


Eclipse Recoiling

by biodigitaljazz



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human/Troll Society (Homestuck), Alternian Empire, Ashen Romance | Auspistice, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Established Relationship, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Human/Troll Relationship (Homestuck), M/M, Multi, Mutual Pining, Of course the quadrants are complicated, Other relationships will probably happen, POV Dave Strider, POV Karkat Vantas, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Post-Break Up, Pre-Relationship, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Temporarily Unrequited Love, Troll Biology (Homestuck), Troll Culture (Homestuck), Wartime Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-14 07:28:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28916874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biodigitaljazz/pseuds/biodigitaljazz
Summary: You aren’t going to fool anyone, especially not yourself. Even though it very clearly wasn’t mutual at the time, you were kick-flipped completely fucking upside down the instant you had those eyes on you.You wish you’d known beforehand that this volatile little butterfly was going to sweep you up into a behemoth of a typhoon, and you’d be the one stuck cleaning up the destruction in its wake for years.
Relationships: Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 17
Kudos: 23





	1. Strider - 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have not written anything at-length for over 5 years.  
> I have not written anything for Homestuck for just about 7.  
> I have had this story idea in my dumb head for maybe... 6?  
> And I'm too old to give a crap anymore. I'm writing Homestuck fanfiction again.  
> It's nice to be back.  
> \---  
> This is gonna be a long one, probably - it'll span over multiple years and change tenses/POVs pretty frequently (starting with Dave in chapter one). The first few chapters might contain a pretty hefty load of exposition, but I'll try to break it up wherever and whenever I can - I'll also be updating characters and tags as I go.

**S T R I D E R**

_  
It’s just one night_ , you tell the over-glorified grease monkey standing in front of you.

 _Just one. Suck it up, buddy.  
  
_ You square your shoulders, straighten your spine, and stare hard at him.  
  
He stares back, at a loss for how you’re expecting him to respond.  
  
Neither of you are willing to take any shit from the other tonight.  
  
Your reflection looks so unfamiliar and out of place, uncomfortably crammed into an ill-fitting tuxedo like poorly prepared, overstuffed Dolmathakia. It’s at least a size and a half too small, and it’s outdated and aged to shit - no amount of ironing or steaming or dry-cleaning could succeed in breathing any real life back into it. It was a free hand-me-down, though, so that grease monkey - now sullenly tugging at his sleeves, trying to cover his wrists a little better and not make the poor fit of the suit’s jacket that much more noticeable - knows that he probably shouldn’t be complaining. He _really_ wants to, though. He thinks that maybe the whole situation isn’t exactly playing fair with him. He could clean up really well if he had better resources, but the only option at his disposal right now makes him look more like a goofy cartoon than military personnel preparing to attend a fancy reception. While they might still pass for ‘wearable’, his shoes are also flirting with fresh death, long beyond the hope of somehow gaining their original luster back. The only tie he has is a bowtie, which he has deeply regretted borrowing from the second he put it on. It looks really stupid on him, like it’s enlarged his head somehow and it’s the only thing keeping it attached to his neck. The one passable saving grace to the whole rumpled ensemble is that the pants still happen to fit over the tragically non-existent knolls of his bony ass.  
  
You watch one another’s red, unobscured eyes and try to think of a way to properly communicate with each other using them. You want tell him how much you hate the ripple of pure emotional resistance, the overpowering _I don’t want to do this_ that just carved its way through you for the upteen-millionth fucking time since you last anxiously checked your watch. Which was what, like, five minutes ago?  
  
You don’t really have to tell him anything, though, because he totally gets it. Of course he does. He doesn’t exactly have a choice.  
  
You empathize with how apprehensive he is. He would rather be doing _anything else_ in the world than this right now. He wants out so bad. He just doesn’t look _correct_ to you tonight. It’s making the back of your neck itch.  
  
With resolute petulance, you’ve already decided that you are going to wear this stupid fucking tuxedo down to its bare threads before you even _begin_ to think about wasting credits (or time, or effort) on something new. It doesn’t have any sentimental value or anything like that, but you just don’t attend enough stuffy soirées requiring you to look like a little kid at his first communion to make any excuses for hastily replacing it. None that would stick, anyway.  
  
If you have your way, you’ll be buried in the damn thing.  
  
 _Hopefully sometime tonight_ , a dark voice whispers to you from the back of your mind. You watch the grease monkey’s jaw muscles tighten, feel your molars creak against each other through your skull. You think that was supposed to be a joke. It falls flat.  
  
The low, monotonous thrum in the air vents of your quarters, now something so familiar to you that it exists only as background noise, seems to briefly crescendo in rhythm with every anxious pulse of the blood in your temples.  
  
Given the experiences that your ‘chosen’ trade has earned you over the years, not a whole lot can really make you nervous, anymore.  
  
You hate to admit that you are very nervous about tonight.  
  
Even if you _are_ one of the only handful of humans in your fleet, you’ve played an important role in keeping town-sized warship cruisers from straying their course and drifting uselessly into the black void of space. You’ve repaired and maintained communication lines to avoid full ship-wide blackouts and kept multiple different engines from seizing during real, legitimate emergencies - not that many of the higher ups would interrupt their hourly boot-licking sessions to even consider giving you enough regard for it to feel salient, but that’s not really a wound you’d super-duper wicked like to open up right now. You’re always stuck hidden away in the underbelly and shielded from the spotlight of the action, sure, but you’re experienced and quick on your feet and are still regularly keeping people (people like _them_ ) alive. You worked your ass off for a long time, enough to earn yourself a promotion (senior engineer, so you’re still an engineer except now you can minimally boss the other ones around) and you haven’t slacked on your increased responsibilities since. You deserve a night like this, rare as they are, just as much as the fucking piffy top brass snooty highbloods do.  
  
It’s complicated. Just because you know deep down that you _do_ deserve the ‘five-star treatment’ whenever it’s offered to you, though, doesn’t need to mean that you necessarily _want_ to deserve it.  
  
You have a pretty good idea of what you might realistically be putting your stupid ass through tonight. You got the heads up from John, bless him. The point of this whole _thing_ is to bring some of the soldiers who had been involved in the interservice transfers that happened years ago back to their home ships. You do put some half-assed effort into staying out of the ranked officers’ business for the most part, but you catch a whiff of scattered water cooler gossip every once in a while to ease long stretches of downtime boredom. You know that your ship is bringing someone back on board to take up the role as your new Thresh Commander (that’s the blood-thirsty, desperate sap who is an _inch_ away from one of the most powerful positions in The Condesce’s army, the real brutal bastards), and you are dimly horrified to admit that you’re willing to place your entire life savings on who that someone is going to be. You don’t even need to look at the notices that have been posted all over the place. John warned you for a reason.  
  
The grease monkey, trying his best to swallow back his rising agitation, thinks _fuck it_ and gives box breathing a shot for a few minutes. You focus on his chest as it slowly expands and deflates, five seconds in, five seconds hold, five seconds out, pause and repeat. He does this a few times, reminding you that you’re starting to give yourself a stress headache, and that you need to calm down before you rip the tuxedo off and slam dunk the poor fucking grandfatherly thing right into the incinerator.  
  
You start a silent argument with him over the very real chance that nobody of any particular interest would even notice if you decided to bail at the last minute and don’t make an appearance tonight. You’re a human, what the fuck do they care, right? The argument - really just a desperate reach for any excuse you can find - dies before it even has a chance to take root. Because _John_ will notice. This is sort of his fault, anyway.  
  
Everyone gets a chance to mingle at these things, regardless of their rank or station. Even though you’re a peon who is usually completely forgotten about once you’re in the bowels of the ship (that IS part of your job, to be fair, but it’s well within your right to be sour apples and childish over it) and get only just enough recognition for it to keep your already strained morale from cannonballing directly into mutiny, you have been graced with the _invitation_ to join the higher ranks for drinks, dinner, and _supremely_ awkward conversations - of which many, you already know, will be predictably and expertly peppered with thinly veiled conceit and antagonizing compliminsults. The last few times you attended these shitty excuses for in-person breakout rooms, you did so on your own and literally only for the free food and alcohol. It's your opinion that mingling really is just for the sake of deep dive ass sniffing, and that kind of literal brown-nosing doesn’t look good on you at all. Going solo meant that you could reap as many of those treats as you wanted before peacing the eff out on your own terms.  
  
But John’s persistence on being your ‘date’ this time around is… pretty literally the only reason you’re giving half a shit tonight. He didn’t explicitly come out and admit exactly what intentions were snuggled up inside that request of his, but you already know. You figured it out instantly and whether or not he realizes that, you kind of don’t care because you unfortunately agree with him. Getting this over with is going to fuck you up _way way less_ than a futile attempt at avoidance eventually would. That, and it is really hard to say no to him when he is asking something so easy and innocent of you.  
  
‘Easy’. That’s not the right word. You’ve managed to live through a handful of fucking _suicide missions_ that all felt like a six-year-old’s birthday party compared to what you’re feeling right now.  
  
You let a long, steady breath out through your mouth and turn your arm a little to glance down at your watch again. Not that it’s hard or anything. It’s plainly visible on your embarrassingly exposed wrist. This jacket _really_ does not fit you anymore.  
  
The grease monkey already looks far too defeated and tired for someone who’s only two years short of thirty. You consider putting your skepticism aside for a second and telling him that he’s got this. It’s just one stupid night, remember? And if anything, it’ll placate John. If the monkey wants, he can go hard on the booze before slipping away from the nonsense for the night. At least it’ll help him sleep. He’s got this.  
  
The monkey still won’t believe you, though, so you set your mouth into a lipless line and don’t tell him shit.  
  
You tug uselessly at the cuffs of the suit coat one more time before slapping your hands against your cheeks and ripping your eyes away from your own expression, still so foreign to you, warped in its own way like a fun-house mirror.  
  
 _Time to dance, monkey, dance_ , you think in a flat and wildly unsuccessful attempt to cheer yourself up, stubbornly swiping your glasses off of the table by the door on your way out.  
  
  
**  
  
  
This kind of ‘party’ is initially how you met Karkat.  
  
That evening dragged its undead corpse by you slowly, _so_ fucking slowly, and there hadn’t been too many folks around who knew your face well enough to approach you for any kind of small talk. Most of the other engineers you kicked it with on the regular used their brains and stayed way the hell away from these kinds of things. You weren’t exactly sure what you expected from it, either. But John was there, and Jade was there. You hadn’t really seen Jade in a hot second since she was stationed on another ship, so maybe what pushed you into coming was the prospect of hanging out and catching up with the both of them at the same time for a while. They both paid a decent amount of attention to you that night, but here’s the thing, John and Jade are both smart, wickedly charismatic, and - above everything - loyal. They climbed the fleet’s ladder enough to gain them a _lot_ of respect and acquaintances outside of your own little best-buddies bubble. You understand, of course - reputation always backpacks itself greedily onto a higher rank and it’s legit important to maintain that at least for a little bit, especially when the opportunity to do it in a group actually presents itself.  
  
What they worked for and achieved as a result was a pretty fucking impressive feat for being human in any Alternian fleet; it was very rare for a human to find themselves on the same upward trajectory as a midblood might. You always wondered if maybe the trolls liked them so much because they were so easy-going and malleable. Trolls had quadrants, and on more than one occasion you’d always sensed that interesting humans were a big Mystery Date game to them. With how accommodating and versatile their personalities were, shit, if you were a troll, you’d be trying to figure out if either of them fit into any of your cuddle puddle pockets, too.  
  
Those two deserved their advancement - you would never, ever deny them that, not for a million years - and as such, deserved to socialize. You got to have your time with them, and wound up having to eventually sternly insist that you were _fine, go flap your jaws with the Alts for awhile and quit mother-henning me_ , because you sensed them getting a little fidgety with the unwanted urge to save face before they lost the chance to do some obligatory mingling of their own. Basic idiot that you are, you did all of that work soothing and reassuring and shooing them, and of course once they left you sitting by yourself at the bar with your third whiskey of the night, you immediately kind of hated yourself for letting a selfish little shadow of loneliness take their place.  
  
You didn’t really want it to screw your entire night into the ground, though, because while you do get moody and sad sometimes like every other sentient being in the galaxy with the ability to feel or display emotions, you’re not the kind of guy to stew in his own negativity soup for too long. You have your own kind of reputation to keep tabs on, anyway, even if it might not be as esteemed as theirs. You refuse to let that reputation slip just because you want to mope like a big old baby for a little bit.  
  
Other engineers always try to test you when they first meet you, ESPECIALLY when they’re trolls. Almost every engineer you’ve worked with on a long-term basis have been low-blood Alternians, and you had to learn fast that it’s got something to do with how their species establishes a hierarchy of respect. They want to push your buttons and see how high or low your threshold for daily verbal harassment sits, and if there’s one thing you pride yourself in, it’s your well-practiced composure and ability to let _a lot of things_ slide. You’re not easily offended or flustered at all, and you know very well that you can navigate your way through an ongoing word war pretty damn effortlessly, if you do say so yourself. You understand what it takes to earn your stripes right off the bat and almost every time, they eventually accept you with open arms and wind up treating you like an equal brother, title be damned. Self-conscious, whimpering sensies don’t emotionally survive very long at all in a group of raucous, loud, insult-flinging, black-tongued group of dirt-streaked alien heathens.  
  
Two more drinks in, you almost felt like you’d been kind of enjoying yourself a little, even on your own. Things were getting gradually calmer and quieter as people slowly started to leave. You aren’t insanely social but you’re not a loner, either. You’re just about as complacent with having a room full of eyes on you as you are with sitting alone in a quiet space. Too much scattered, directionless activity makes you twitchy after a while, though, and too much exposure to strange bright lighting always ends up just hurting your delicate eyes and irritating your anisocoria. You did a Real Big Dumb that night and left your sunglasses in your bunk, so especially with the drinking, you were nice and prepared to suffer through what was probably going to be a fucking monster of a headache in the morning.  
  
What happened next was an accident.   
  
Seriously.  
  
You’d been zoning out while you finished your last ( _very_ strong) drink for the night, fully intending on slipping away undetected when you were done - because you couldn’t see much of a point in hunting John or Jade down to say goodnight - and you’d admittedly kind of stopped paying attention to your immediate surroundings and personal space. Even after the glass was empty and back on the bar, you slouched there uselessly for a little while longer like you were in your own little world, before finally dredging up the energy to scrub a hand roughly over your face and drag yourself up to your feet  
  
It was the slightest little nudge with your elbow, but judging by the reaction that came out of whoever you bumped into as a result, you’d think that you just picked them up and hurled them across the room or something instead. The whole ‘incident’ could have been forgotten about so easily with a quick apology, but before you even had the opportunity to do _that_ much, the fucking drama queen turned and hissed at you in a way that humans definitely can’t, low and vibrating fast in the throat like a rattler.  
  
You would occasionally see visitors from different fleets at parties like this and you suppose it was really to fish around and see if any soldiers or officers were looking to make lateral moves for the sake of location or convenience. This isn’t exactly protocol all of the time, but if two fleets are planning to band together for a similar goal or mission, it’s not uncommon to see these visits being discreetly treated as half gala, half gussied-up job fair. Trolls really liked to swap one another around a whole lot. You didn’t know if it was to keep shit at work interesting, or if some of them were (literally) at each other's' throats enough to have to relocate, or who knew why. You never asked, because you never had a reason to.  
  
You really like trolls. They have strange customs, interesting mannerisms, a cool but hard as fuck language to wrap the typical human tongue around. The ones you’d met and worked with before this specific night had been all kinds of quirky, loud and brash, confident, and, to your curious enjoyment, similar to humans in a lot of ways but also so _different_ with their harsh angles and rough edges. You don’t much care for the self-important, trust fund attitudes that the highbloods tend to have, but overall, they suit you just fine. They keep you on your toes and insult you _just enough_ , like they’re backing you up against the edge of a skyscraper’s roof and wait for you to finally start losing your balance before they yank you back.  
  
This one meant _business_. He was short and slim, shorter than you remember trolls to be on average, his horns were small and looked _soft_ somehow, and if the general gist of his entire expression was any indication, he was restraining himself from tearing your face off and force-feeding it to you. He snapped (for real, you could hear the clack of his sharp teeth colliding) something like “Watch what you’re doing, you dumb fuck” in Alternian, but you couldn’t take it personally even if you wanted to because you were too busy shallowly thinking that this mean little thing was _really_ damn easy to look at - just barely wavy black hair, small ears, nice cheekbones, and a shade of red pinpointing the sea of gold in his eyes that you’d never seen on another troll before.   
  
Red, huh? Would you look at that. Red and coiled tight, blazing with barely-repressed artillery fire.  
  
You aren’t going to fool anyone, especially not yourself. Even though it very clearly wasn’t mutual at the time, you were kick-flipped completely fucking upside down the instant you had those eyes on you.  
  
You wish you’d known beforehand that this volatile little butterfly was going to sweep you up into a behemoth of a typhoon, and you’d be the one stuck cleaning up the destruction in its wake for years.  
  
  
**  
  
  
The fancy circus sideshow is being held in a lounge only a block or so away from the docking bays, on a space station that you’ve been to so many times that you’re surprised and frankly insulted that none of the regulars in the usual dive bars and fast food joints know you by name yet. The station is designed like some kind of suburban city and it can get pretty busy in this area around the bays, but with a party going on, there are people fucking _everywhere_. You keep your head up and weave through them toward the lounge at the end of the street nonchalantly, pretending as hard as you can that you _don’t_ look like an adult man purposely wearing a small child’s ring bearing suit. Your flatulent dignity knows better. You look dumb.  
  
When you approach John in the foyer of the in front of the lounge, the first thing you do is slap on a hilariously forced smile that most definitely doesn’t make it up to your eyes (nobody would be able to see that part, so whatev), and you salute him loosely, in a casual kind of way that only he would really tolerate. The attitude around saluting has grown a lot more relaxed over time, a far cry from how strict the show of respect had been centuries ago. You’re part of an Alternian armada and honorifics are handled a bit differently, but it feels deliciously inappropriate to do it regardless, with such an obvious middle finger included.   
  
It’s still strange when such outstandingly different fleets intermingle with one another. It used to be way stranger, though, far back before you’d enlisted when nobody could get their affairs in order and discharge their heads from their own asses long enough to understand that _not all armies were created equal_ when you started introducing literal alien militaries to one another.  
  
Fortunately, everyone eventually got on the same page and figured all of their political garbage out, which you are honestly very grateful for because you can only imagine how hard and potentially dangerous it must be to try and memorize what to do for which military rank of what species. A squishy human butting heads, literally head-butting, with a species much larger or stronger or pointier or whatever than them as a sign of respect doesn’t seem incredibly productive, to you. What good is your wing commander if they have to immediately be discharged for accidental blunt force trauma?  
  
Many changes were established by the time you hitched yourself to this crazy ride, but you still reflexively salute your human superiors whenever you see one and the opportunity comes along - which is rare, because there aren’t many of them in troll-dominated territories these days. You may be lower on the totem pole, but word gets around fast and some douchenozzle in a fancier uniform could get a dick up their ass over you neglecting to acknowledge them the way they want. You aren’t super stoked to possibly have that passed along to your own fleet, so you avoid the opportunity instead of poking the bear. You would still like to keep your job.  
  
Besides, you don’t have horns to display for your commanding Alternian officers, so they don’t really expect shit out of you anyway.  
  
John predictably does tolerate your deliberately ill-mannered take on it, allowing one corner of his mouth to twitch up but not really bothering to mask just how badly he wants to slap your hand away from your face. He looks prim and handsome in his own suit. You’re a little jealous.  
  
“At ease,” he says sarcastically. “Jerkoff.”  
  
It’s difficult to not smile around John. You were young when you first met, not even teenagers yet, and sometimes you’re still kind of surprised by how little things have changed between you even with the hands of time stretching and pulling everyone else apart. You helped one another grow up. Shared so many birthdays with one another. Shoulder-checked your way through the worst parts of puberty and middle school bullying and woefully dateless school dances together. Held video game marathons. Did backyard camp-outs. Spent hours stargazing on the roof of your childhood home, your hands tucked behind your heads, both of you wondering what it would be like to finally get the hell off of your withering, dying planet, what it would be like to see a star up close for the first time. The two of you are so tightly entwined with more history and more love than you share with anybody else and even though you went your separate ways for a little while to focus on honing your respective career skills, your plan from day one was always to wind up in the same fleet of the space force together, didn’t matter for what species as long as it was the same. And by fuck, you crazy kids, you did just that.  
  
It goes without saying that tonight is bound to be an emotional doozy for you, so even though you’d been carping to yourself about his insistence to accompany you to this stupid dinner only a few minutes ago, you find yourself feeling really relieved that he’s with you. You couldn’t possibly hope for a better, more wonderful person to have your imaginary dramatic mental breakdown in front of later.  
  
All honorifics are dropped at the door for the evening and even though everyone is prettied up and intimidating, the loosened grip on formality makes the room’s atmosphere at least a _little_ more tolerable, like force-feeding yourself sewing needles instead of nails. The lounge itself is just as dressy as its attendees, having swapped what you can only closely compare to the aesthetic of a higher-end night club for grandiose, sweeping draperies of golds and midnight blues, far classier table settings that you’re sure will be largely ignored, higher-shelved alcohols and less appetizing finger foods. Instead of trying to convey an edgier and more youthful mood with painfully bright lights in a darkened room, the ambience for this party is radiant, warm, and inviting.  
  
This is one hundred percent an event put in place to welcome soldiers back to their home ship and to kiss the asses of the ones who’ve been promoted during their time away, they aren’t even trying to be subtle. And here, you’d been uselessly hoping that maybe you got the memo wrong and it was just going to be another excuse for the elites to coalesce in one place and use the informality as a sly chance to loosen some tongues with the free-flowing alcohol. They _love_ getting dirt on each other to tuck into a nice little pocket, just in case it’s needed for blackmail further down the road.  
  
Your eyes swim around the elegantly and pristinely decorated room over and over while your mind tries to find a thought to latch onto, but then you feel a hand on the small of your back. John must sense your tense energy, and knows that the touch is not really going to comfort you all that much. You think that maybe it actually comforts _him_ , instead. He keeps his hand there regardless. Even if it’s not comforting, it’s still nice and grounding.  
  
To his credit, he refuses to leave your side even as other people start noticing him and tossing him invitational greetings. He returns them in the most cheerful, respectful, and unassuming way possible, of course, but he makes it pretty clear that his attention is diverted elsewhere at the moment - he probably gets the sense that now is not the time to smooch you on the nose, sit you on a shelf, and run off to play with the cooler toys. Instead, he leads you directly to the bar, not even asking if that’s where you wanted to go because he doesn’t have to. He orders you both drinks (you don’t pay attention, he’s pointing to his order on a menu behind the counter while you’re busy throwing paranoid glances at the wide open doors of the lounge) and when they come, your fingers are practically grappling for yours before the bartender - an Alternian with savagely large horns that kinda remind you of a moose and an expression that tells you he’s already mentally checked out for the night - even has time to fully withdraw his hand. You take an immediate, strong gulp - something with rum in it, tastes like - and John stays quiet until your stout little glass is set down onto a coaster.  
  
“I know that it’s basically pointless to ask,” he says. You love him so damn much but you feel irritation scratch its way down your spine when your brain dissects his careful, sympathetic tone. You kinda need that tone in a pretty major way right now, of course, but it still touches you in all the wrong places. “But how are you doing right now?”  
  
You’re a little suspicious that maybe he’s Baby Bjorning you into a false sense of security and it doesn’t sit right with you, but you’ll have to take what you can get right now because every single time you happen to catch movement anywhere around those doors out of the corner of your eye, the thin edges of your vision brighten with alarm. You loathe the security blanket that he’s handing to you, but you clutch at it anyway and start angrily sucking your thumb while you resent yourself.  
  
God, cold dread makes you fucking clingy. You can’t stand that.  
  
The newcomers should be starting to trickle in basically any minute now, and you’re spending whatever precious time you have left beforehand suddenly regretting your decision to show up and wondering how you’re going to get through the night without throwing up into a fake potted plant somewhere.  
  
You twist your body a little more toward John, enough to turn your back on those doors. You really shouldn’t look at them right now.  
  
“Not spectacular,” you respond. You only just put it down seconds ago, but you scoop your glass back up and finish the contents off. You drink too much lately, you think, but that right there is a deep personal problem to crack open and rummage through later. Way later.  
  
That’s all you give him, and you can tell he doesn’t want to leave it there. His expression doesn’t change much, but his mouth twitches as he habitually chews on the inside of his cheek. He’s doing his best to find and hold eye contact with you through the plastic of your dark glasses. Keep trying, buddy. You’ll probably get there, eventually.  
  
“I’m worried about you,” he tells you. It takes every single last shred of self-restraint you have not to white-knuckle the edge of the countertop, but something betrays your attempt to remain indifferent and slips up in your posture or your face. “ _Seriously_.” He’s pressing you, as gently as he can; you are an exceptionally chill dude but he can tell easily that you have had a temper building up under the surface of your ice over the past couple of years, and the last thing he wants to do is misstep. “I’m sorry that I dragged you into this, but…” Now even _he_ glances idly over your shoulder at the doorway.  
  
This flighty little pisspot, you already know exactly why you got gingerly strong-armed into coming here tonight and he’s still trying to figure out how to stop dancing around it. He wants you to rip the damn bandaid off so you’re not spending the next couple of months trying your hardest to avoid a prominent commander and going into cardiac arrest when an inevitable chance meeting sneaks up on you and you have to deal with the problem face to face when you’re not prepared to. Does he really think you’re that dense?  
  
...because you _are_ that dense, okay, fine. You’ve been entertaining that cowardly escape route all day.  
  
“But it’s way quicker and more successful if you shoot yourself in the head instead of the chest,” you finish for him morbidly. “I get it, man.”  
  
He frowns a little at the way you decided to word that. “Dave.”  
  
“You don’t have to tiptoe,” you add uselessly.  
  
“I wasn’t trying to tiptoe,” he says, and pauses to order another of the same from the bartender. For you, of course, since he’s still nursing his first one. It earns him back the brownie point he managed to lose a second ago. “I just didn’t know how you’d react. It’s not a great subject.”  
  
You snort dryly. Understatement of the fucking century. “It was six years ago.”  
  
“It was pretty major for you.”  
  
You don’t respond until you have your second drink in your possession. You make a point not to finish this one so quickly, opting instead for a longer, slower mouthful.  
  
“ _And_ it was six years ago,” you repeat, breathing out over your tongue to ease the sting of the alcohol. “It’s behind me now.”  
  
That is a monumental lie. It hasn’t left you for a single day. It’s standing nearby and watching you, right at this moment. It wakes up with you in the morning and stares at you while you brush your teeth. It tries to hold your hands while you’re working. You can taste it on your food and hear it whisper intimately to you when things around you get too quiet. At night, it handcuffs you to the bed and it sits on your chest until you can’t breathe. It sings you to sleep, its voice pressing into every inch of you like a fire-hot branding iron. It is a stalwart phantom lingering in the corners of every room you walk into, loudly and brazenly haunting you, and you are a fucking clown if you think that you have even the _smallest_ chance of exorcising it anytime soon.  
  
John goes quiet, looking down into his drink. He’s grown a lot over the past few years, you realize. Emotionally. There’s an intelligent maturity to him that was only there in shades and shadows when he was younger, and now it’s flourishing in a way that makes him a lot easier to talk to, even when you aren’t talking about much of anything at all.  
  
You really aren’t sure where else you can lead this conversation. You’re sort of praying that maybe you can just stay off of the topic for the time being, but he’s trying to help you preliminarily prep yourself for how you’re going to feel and react when _that bastard_ stomps his way into the same room as you for the first time in over half a decade.  
  
The phantom wiggles its fingers at you from its spot across the bar. You scowl and decide that you’d like to finish this drink quickly, after all.  
  
“You’ve just changed a lot, you know?” John murmurs when he finally has his thoughts in order. He’s brought this exact thing up before, quite a few times, so it doesn’t set you on edge or raise your hackles anymore. The last time he said something like this to you, he said that it felt like a softness in you - something that made you _you_ \- ran away and went into hibernation. You were tempted to correct him. That ‘something’ isn’t sleeping, baby; it’s been six feet under for a long time now. “I still wish you’d talk to someone.”  
  
You give him the facade of a half-baked smile. “That’s not what our therapists are there for, guy.”  
  
He knows better than to argue with you about this by now, and you feel a momentary flurry of guilt invade your conscience. It must make him feel pretty shitty and helpless to have his best friend constantly shoving aside everything he does to try and make things _better already_.  
  
He’s pausing again to take a sip from his glass and you place your hand on his shoulder, with all the familiarity and closeness of a friendship that has persevered through what feels like everything.  
  
He finally allows the muscles in his face to relax and he smiles lightly. “I’m not going anywhere tonight, okay? Not unless you want me to.”  
  
You give his shoulder a squeeze before letting go of him and leaning your elbow on the bartop. A knot inside of you somewhere is beginning to loosen a little and even _that_ is relieving enough for you. “I hope it doesn’t make any of your other buddies jealous.”  
  
He dismissively shrugs. “They won’t miss me.”  
  
“Sure,” you drawl back. “We both know there’ll be _chatter_ in the morning.”  
  
He tilts his head down to the side a little and looks up at you through his eyelashes. He’s so damn cute. “Oh, come on.”  
  
“Really. Who deigns to be seen with the bottom dregs of the pigpen these days?” You are half joking.  
  
His lips purse a little. “Literally nobody craps on engineering the way you claim they do. You are always such a dramatic assbutt about that.”  
  
Feh. You’ll believe that when you experience it firsthand. “So the next time someone in your rank or higher talks to me like they’re humoring a dumb little boy trying to play cops and robbers with them, I should just come find you and tell on them, right?”  
  
He doesn’t like this topic. “Please don’t. I hate it when people tattle.”  
  
“Fine, fine,” you concede. You can always pick this back up another time when those shiny horned buddies of his aren’t in such deliciously precarious earshot. You take the lead in switching it up because you are still a ball of taut rubber bands and casual conversation is helping right now. “Some of the people coming back in —“ _don’t think about it too hard, just don’t, ask the question and don’t dwell_ “— are basics, right? Got your work cut out for the next month?”  
  
His demeanor changes drastically and he sighs, letting it out between his lips, turning it into a soft raspberry. “Yeeaahhh…” He draws it out like he wants so fucking badly to let it become a whine but can’t bring himself to because of his pride.  
  
“You are literally the best lieutenant to get trained under, dude, you’re ‘bout as mean as angel food cake.” Lieutenant. What this would equate to in Alternia is way beyond you; humans don’t get Alternian titles.  
  
“I mean, thanks for the compliment, but you’ve seen how I am literally obligated to handle anyone who dips even the slightest toe out of line.” You have, and even though he does have to get stern sometimes, he’s still nowhere near as mean as the other flight lieutenants tend to get. The complete opposite of you, he has such a hard time putting himself into the mentality of a troll, even just a troll cadet or pilot, because he’s just not made of the same stuff. He has a good pair of lungs and a strong voice in him. He can sound forceful without having to yell. He just doesn’t like to do it. There’s too much sympathetic, spongey love in the guy. “Jade can do it a little better than I can, I think. She doesn’t feel as bad about, uh… as. As bad… about yelling at people.”  
  
That stuttering little hiccup is laughably obvious and not even remotely lost on you; the moment it happens, the good humor is gone. You shut down and stop listening to him completely. He knows it, too, because his eyes flit to something behind you, then back to you, and this precious, wonderful man, he’s trying to figure out how he can gain some kind of his nonchalant momentum back, but that train has already long left the station.  
  
Your mind goes totally blank. You thought you’d be ready for this - you’ve known it was coming for over a week and have even been internally practicing what you’d do or say or _whatever_ when the time came - but you are pretty helpless against the way anxiety is suddenly grabbing your lungs and holding them hostage and all of those fantastical plans are flung out the window entirely. All at once, the pounding in your temples from earlier comes back to you with twice the strength as before, the room feels like it’s going kind of crooked and you feel a prickling sheet of sweat suddenly hiss across the middle of your back. You desperately search John’s expression for… what? For help? But you can tell, whatever tactics of mediation that he had planned for the course of the night just got wrenched out of him and he looks like he’s got stage fright, trying so hard to remember his next line.  
  
You don’t miss the swallow he takes before he looks up at you again, emotionally grounding the _shit_ out of himself. Since he doesn’t know what to say to you, he repeats a gesture similar to the one you gave him earlier, placing a gentle hand on your bicep and squeezing. The contact is momentary and fleeting.  
  
“I’ll be back, okay?” he says quietly, and moves around you.  
  
He’s heading for the door, you already know. With him gone, you feel a little less put on the spot and you make yourself enjoy a quick, solitary respite so that you don’t _actually_ have a gigantic fucking panic attack in front of your entire fleet. You want to be back to normal so badly, back to cool and collected and unflappable but right now that old phantom, you know the one, has finally moved in to possess you and you’re regrettably powerless. Nobody has ever made you feel like this before. You guess, bitterly, that you could say the same for just about anything that asshole has made you feel since you met the fucker. That’s why you’ve been asking yourself if you’re prepared enough to have this interaction yet.  
  
Are you seriously, _really_ ready for this?  
  
You still don’t know if you are. You probably aren’t. Gotta happen, regardless.  
  
You take a deep breath in, so deep that it burns your lungs a little, and as fucking casually as you can - it’s a strain, you are putting literally your entire soul into constructing that last-minute safety wall and trying to keep it from crumbling - you look back over your shoulder.  
  
You were right.  
  
You aren’t ready for this.


	2. Vantas - 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Your plan was not to interact in any way with the intoxicated wad of wet paper towels sitting on the stool next to yours.
> 
> Too bad for you, right? Fuck your whole life, right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A buttload of more exposition, I’m so sorry. This will be done after this chapter, for the most part - setting a stage can be annoyingly long-winded.

**V A N T A S**

_  
It’s just one night_, you tell the straight-laced, rigid, sour-faced toy soldier reflected in front of you.

_Just one. Suck it up._

_Suck a bulge,_ he snaps back aggressively.

Yeah. You knew that wasn’t going to work. Why you even bothered, you couldn’t say - there’s no point trying to reason with him let alone boss him around when he’s already barely holding himself back from hurling his ill-fated ass through the window next to him and leaving the rest of the work to the precious vacuum of space.

You look away from the asshole in the mirror and glance out of that window. The blackness looks back, cold and wide and horrifying.  
  
You’ve only been back on the home vessel for half a day so far and you already feel like the sterile walls of your new quarters are inching in around you. You could have used the downtime that you had between coming onboard and now to at least _try_ and get a little more comfortable – unpack, put shit away, fill up the strange, unused recuperacoon in the corner of the room and maybe nap off some of the exhaustion that’s been slowly bending your bones in every direction since your transference started – but all you’ve managed to accomplish up until now has been getting your work desk set up and sitting uselessly on the sofa across the room, sagging against the cushions, staring at one of those foreign walls and completely fucking dissociating for a while.  
  
Your arrival had been thankfully low-key, giving you some reprieve after traveling for so long and before what you are sure will be a whole lot of ridiculous blowhard, ring-kissing pomp and circumstance later on. A lot of your ‘peers’ have shamelessly admitted that they fully expect and enjoy that sort of lavish attention, but not you. You don’t fundamentally _disagree_ with it, you guess, when it’s aimed at someone else. You just don’t want any part of it - it feels fraudulent and misleading, and your skin crawls uneasily even just thinking about being treated with such brazen disingenuity. It feels fucking _dirty._ You didn’t endure years of daily beatings and violence and verbal abuse because it sounded like a romp through a field of fucking flowers. You didn’t claw your way (literally, with your actual claws) to your current station just to have a shot at joining the VIP section and hobnob with all of the other snobby douche-canoes while you look down your nose at other soldiers like they don’t matter nearly as much as you do.  
  
With all due respect, fuck the hemospectrum in absolutely every direction.  
  
It wouldn’t have mattered if that was your goal anyway, because even though you’re finally there, right in arm’s reach of where you’ve literally been waiting your entire existence to be, you’re still being watched more closely than others in your rank are, still stared at by skeptical eyes, still approached with either uncertainty or (more often than not) the attitude that you may have made strides that not many of ‘your kind’ tend to make, but you should still be _remembering your proper place_ . You might be succeeding in getting to where a higher blooded soldier usually does, but that doesn’t erase the stigma of your own blood that’s practically tattooed across your fucking forehead.  
  
The only thing you can do when that kind of shit is flung at you is to keep your raging maw shut and just take it, and pretend that it doesn’t puncture your shell like they want it to. You’ve perfected the refusal to give anyone any kind of self-satisfaction down to an art, so much that you've actually managed to start convincing yourself that it's working and it doesn’t bother you.  
  
Sure, fine, maybe you’re delusional. Better delusional than weak.  
  
Still, you can’t help it; you hope things are going to be, if anything, a little better now that you have the new title to hide behind. At least you’re _coming in_ with a higher rank instead of getting promoted in front of the same people who had to watch you fight for it from the ground up. That will probably be helpful, you think. No more getting things thrown at you when you’re not expecting it. No more getting spat on. Same old home vessel but clean slate, or what the fuck ever.

You're already lonely.

It’s not the most comfortable feeling, having left the ship as an ectobiologist and stand-in cadet and only three solar sweeps later coming back a fucking Thresh Commander. You’re going to see some repercussions for that because who do you think you are, red-blooded and holding a title that should have gone to an indigo or a violet instead? Even a blue would be better than a vile mutant who should have been outcast or even culled the second his eye color filled in.  
  
Shame surges through you and you straighten up with purpose, looking back at your reflection unhappily. Everything about you, at least on the outside, changes. You were the runt of your brood and have always been significantly smaller than the average Alternian, but even just pushing your shoulders back and uncoiling your spine makes you look taller and broader.  
  
The toy soldier looks more impressive, now. You know he doesn’t feel that way, but fuck his feelings - he needs to put on a show tonight and he can’t afford to let _emotions_ take the lead. You tug the bottom of your uniform's jacket, not really for any specific reason, and run your hands along your thighs to smooth out non-existent wrinkles. You took incredibly careful measures to ensure that all of your military garb got to its new home safely; your uniforms were the only thing you really made a point to unpack and hang up or otherwise store away. The one you're wearing to tonight's event is the one that survived the trip in the best condition. And even then, you did everything to get it looking even more pristine. You treat your damn uniforms like they're your matesprits or something. You aren’t proud of that, but you’re not getting flushed ass from anyone else and you’re law-abidingly forbidden to contribute to the reproductive slurry, so you might as well have something else to put the energy into.

You’re inadequately trying to distract yourself. No matter where you try to direct your thoughts, the fact remains that things have the potential to get really, _really_ awkward tonight.

“You can fucking do this,” you tell the toy soldier with no trace of actual encouragement. Your voice sounds hollow and robotic.  
  
If you imagine hard enough, you can convince yourself for the next couple of hours that this declaration is true. You didn’t mean to say it out loud, though. That still happens to you a lot, even after you've put so much effort into training yourself to _shut up_ when all you want to do is unleash a torrential tsunami of scathing word vomit.

You stare at the soldier. He stares back, his face pinched into a concentrated frown. He doesn’t believe you for a fucking second, but it looks like you do have a begrudging agreement now - puff yourself up, play the game, and when the night is over, you can go back to sulking and being a surly candyass to your own awful face in the mirror.  
  
You turn fully away from the reflection before you make yourself feel like a sad little wiggler all over again, and you leave the room.  
  
Aside from the expected white noise of a ship’s ventilation system, the hallways are eerily quiet as your meticulously shined shoes carry you to the elevators that will take you to the docking bay. This ship isn’t a newer model - older Alternian ships were built and operated kind of like shit and only look nice when it’s been docked for a while and put through a rigorous deep-clean. It looks like you missed the cleaning, but it must have happened recently; even the windows lining the wall of the hallway seem to be freshly washed, streak-free and almost alarmingly clear, as though the reinforced-to-shit fused silica isn’t one of the only major things between you and the yawning gullet of deep space.

You eye them warily as you pass them. You fuck yourself up a little every time you think about that kind of thing for too long.  
  
The elevator ride from the upper quarters to ground level of the ship is fast and smooth. When the shining steel doors hiss open again, you’re battered in the face with the acrid and crude smell of engine fuel and the very sudden sounds of frantic, loud-mouthed engineers and dock agents, with a bustling cityscape waiting for you right outside the bay doors. Ecstasis is one of the more popular metropolitan stations in this part of the galaxy and it sees a lot of traffic - you would need at least six more hands if you wanted to count how many different species of aliens you’d seen pass through every time you docked here. It’s a station that never really sleeps, which is why it’s perfect for these kinds of _whatever_ parties - everything is open late and there’s a bougie lounge right in the center of what you can only guess would be a ‘downtown’ area if it was a real city. You can see that lounge from the docking bay, it’s a straight-shot walk from where you’re standing right now, and you breathe back your uneasy irritability as you move with dead-set purpose into the simulated night, your posture straight and your expression neutral.  
  
When you enter the main foyer that precedes the actual dining lounge, you’re met with a scene that sharply contrasts the cold and sterile ship floor you just came from. It’s crowded and noisy with a cacophony of muddled voices all talking at once, and it has a forced warmth to it that you almost scowl with disgust at. _Fucking great,_ you think. Seems you were perfectly on target for the incoming shit-eating ostentation.  
  
You do not know any of these people well enough to dive into a random group and introduce yourself, not that you even have the slightest inclination to. Unwanted attention is like torture to you, and you’re already starting to feel a sting of self-consciousness as eyes begin to find you, some curious, but most that have probably been connected to a grapevine or two and have _heard about you_ , already fabricating their own shitty _opinions_. You don’t look at any of the fucking highbloods because why the shit should you? But you _do_ begrudgingly acknowledge any of the new, wide-eyed cadets who take notice and seem to forget that (a) these events don’t call for mandatory gallantry or (b) you’re supposed to be the laughing-stock of the higher officers so saluting you would probably be setting them up for nagging and taunting from their superiors later on. They stop whatever they’re doing to face you, throw a clumsy arm and balled fist over their chest, and bow their heads slightly to present their horns to you. You settle for glaring back at them in return, signaling to them in your own absolutely unmistakeable way that they can knock it off and put their fucking arm down, this isn’t a drill or anything. It’s a damn party. You couldn't care less about being saluted tonight.  
  
You know that if you stop or hesitate now, you are going to lose any of the well-practiced composure that you’ve swathed yourself in to make it through the night without snapping. Keeping your head up, you cross the threshold into the lounge, pushing your reflexive self-preservation into the corner for the time being and keeping your rising bloodpusher rate to yourself.  
  


***

  
John was the one who _formally_ introduced you to Dave, but you met him before that by accident on the same space station at the same lounge.  
  
‘Accident’. Right. On your part, maybe.  
  
You don’t remember what the headlining occasion was because every single fucking one of them was just a tired repeat of the last one, just wearing a different costume. The only thing you care to recall is that you’d been dragged there by Pyrope, and only because she was impossible, in the most literal sense, to deny when she got a hyper-focused idea into her head. She had taken blatant advantage of the fact that you’d told her once, _one single time_ , that you probably wouldn’t say no if you’d been somehow miraculously headhunted for another fleet because yours was a raging, abusive shitstorm. 

Turned out that, of course, she was the legislacerator working for the fleet holding the _whateveritwas_ gathering going on that night and since you talked pretty regularly between missions, you’d let it slip that you were docked on Ecstasis for the same week that she was. She used to operate under your fleet, on the same ship as you, but the law tended to shuffle their people around a lot more than the military did because the regulations changed faster than you could (or bothered to) keep up with. You liked her, genuinely. She actually treated you like you had a place, some place, fuck, _any_ place in Alternian society and it did you a lot of good having a legislacerator standing up for you. It would have hurt your pride a little if anyone left you any fucking pride to hurt to begin with. Blood color meant nothing to her as far as treating someone with any crumb of respect went - “I’m blind, you stupid dork,” she’d say to you and maybe give you a slap on the arm that was _way_ too hard. “I can’t see your blood, and also I don’t care.”  
  
You knew that would have been a giant shithead to say no to her, considering your history. You kind of owed it to her.  
  
Also, she aggressively repeated to you, she really wanted ‘a date’. So. There you were.  
  
Halfway through the night you were ready to fucking kill her.  
  
You know it wasn’t her intention, but all your agreement to acquiesce and go with her earned you was the feeling that you were just kind of her little mutant seeing-eye barkbeast (not that she needed your help to actually get around, she was more capable of taking care of herself than _you_ were) and that made you uncomfortable. She chained you to her side pretty much all evening and you’d been steadily losing your patience with her. Not only were you completely disinterested in everything going on around you while she and her pinwheeling, manic energy socialized with just about anyone she could get her claws into, but if you were going to maybe in your wildest, most unrealistic dreams entertain the idea of actually considering a transfer, you realistically couldn’t do it while you were being tugged around as her arm candy.  
  
That said, by the time you actually managed to slip the hell away from her while she got caught up in an animated conversation with someone else, all you wanted to do was sit, breathe, and rehydrate. You’d always had a particularly finite amount of emotional and social stamina and once you started dipping below the danger line, all bets were off and you became a walking deathtrap. And that just happened to be the disposition you were in when _Dave happened_.  
  
You were feeling pretty fucking hostile by the time you sat down, pinching the bridge of your nose before looking over the available drinks on a menu posted in large Alternian font behind the bar. You ordered the first non-alcoholic thing you could see and spent the next minute or two rubbing at your temples and piecing your exit strategy together - finish a drink, find Terezi, tell her that you were going home, and spend the rest of the night hiding in your quarters and yelling at opinionated fucks shit-barfing themselves all over everything on the spacenet to make yourself feel even just a little bit better. Your plan was _not_ to interact in any way with the intoxicated wad of wet paper towels sitting on the stool next to yours.  
  
Too bad for you, right? Fuck your whole life, right?  
  
Unwanted contact is something that you abhor way above most other things when it comes to people you don’t know. It’s why you’ve recoiled with disgust any time a human has attempted to greet you by sticking their dumb nubby hand out toward you. Humans could be so self-centered with their so-called ‘niceties’. Trolls don’t _shake hands_. Why would a first meeting require physical tactility? Alternians may be handsy with one another when they become familiar or close, but to have an alien extend something so undesired was culturally offensive and insulting.  
  
The impact of the sharp, bony elbow unexpectedly jabbing back to make _unwanted contact_ with you jostled your arm and spilled some of the drink you just picked up over the side of its glass and right fucking into your lap. You may have only been an ectobiologist at the time, barely seen as a true scientist let alone a soldier, but you’d still had basic training for preservation’s sake and it only took you half a second to react, slamming the glass back down onto the bartop with enough force to earn you a heated glare from the Alternian bartender on the other side, whipping around to the offender with your teeth bared. That was MORE than enough to set you off. You’d already been on the edge of exploding all night, and you’d reached the detonation point by then.  
  
“Watch what the fuck you’re doing, fucking _piss-gargling asshole_ ,” you growled loudly at him, your voice curving around the threatening buzz thrumming from the back of your throat.  
  
Luckily for you, _holy shit_ luckily for you, it wasn’t a highblood. That would have been moderately catastrophic. He wasn’t even a troll - he was a human. You were _not_ in the correct state of mind to deal with any fun, random, unimpressively exotic alien horseshit that night, but for some reason, even though you thought you were doing a _fantastic_ job at intimidating him to back the fuck down, thank you very much, he still blew right past your efforts like it was nothing - he mumbled a quick, pathetic apology and introduced himself in Earth English, which you could not have found more disrespectful in the moment seeing as you were the wronged party in this confrontation and thus, deserved to be granted the upper hand with at least a _little_ humility. It didn’t fucking matter that you had been schoolfed the language while you were growing up since it was one of the more prominent languages that many humans spoke - while you are a far cry from fluent, you can still understand it and speak it just fine. It was the _principal_ of the thing.  
  
Holy motherfuck was he persistent, though; you didn’t give him any indication whatsoever that you were interested in prolonging your ‘interaction’ with him, but he kept pushing, kept _talking_ in his own stupid language with his stupid, drawling voice. You could have stormed away and been done with it, you at least had control over that, but you were already worked up and like _fuck_ you were about to let a human subdue you the way that only a highblood could.  
  
You tried everything you could to get him to back off, utilized every single little angry, scathing thing that worked on anyone else thick enough to approach you when you’re ready to explode, but no matter how repellent, how rude, or how insulting you were, he just didn’t let up. It was like you weren’t even giving it any effort at all. You didn’t think humans could take this sort of exchange with a troll, but he was parrying everything you jabbed at him.  
  
You should have known right from the start that he was a fucking engineer. There was no way you were going to get under his skin the way you really wanted to because he already knew, professionally and with years of experience behind him, how to navigate people like you. 

It was infuriating. 

It was _challenging_. 

It was the most interesting thing to happen to you all night.

Exactly _when_ the change occured you can’t pinpoint in hindsight, but somewhere within the complicated folds of your heated ‘conversation’, the direction of your respective attitudes toward everything had quietly and smoothly shifted from repulsion to intrigue. 

You got over being curious about humans decades ago. While you didn’t have anything personal against the species in general, you also didn’t feel the need to fraternize with them if you weren’t obligated to. Aside from a few (let it be known, _very_ few) exceptions, you’d decided over time that they were overall soft, delicate, and uninteresting.

 _This_ one, though. _This_ fucking one.  
  
He could keep pace with you. He was familiar with this combative song and dance very closely, and you just _knew_ that he genuinely felt some twisted manifestation of fun participating in it. He didn’t give three holy shits whether you wanted his attention or not. Normally, this would have set numerous alarms off in your head; getting involved with over-aggressive aliens - males, in particular - was a thing you made a specific point to avoid, but his resolve was unwavering (holy shit, who _was_ this pompous shithead, where in the galaxy did he _come_ from), and you had to accept the fact that you’d been starting to find his confidence more curiously off-putting than irritating. You’d never had a human show you _this_ _much_ attention before but you’d been around them long enough to catch on how they operated interpersonally, and before you could stop the thought from hitting you, you realized that this seemed suspiciously like an incredibly blatant and antagonistic endeavor to flirt with you.  
  
Humans didn’t inherently have quadrants to your knowledge, so the point of flirting with them was mostly lost on you. Some trolls - not many, but some - had chosen to forsake the cultural rules of relationships, choosing to become one-colored and monogamous for a member of another species if the relationship appropriately called for it. You’d never given it much thought, yourself, but the one time it fleetingly crossed your mind, you’d concluded pretty fast that the idea of not having multiple partners of different types seemed boring and unfulfilling to you.  
  
Not that you were one to fucking judge. You couldn’t even juggle one quadrant all by itself let alone taking a blind shot in the dark with filling all four. Which is why you’d essentially abandoned the idea altogether, and didn’t put your energy into even _trying_ to pursue anyone anymore.  
  
Still...

You’d slipped entirely into a belligerent and energetic banter with him by the time John found the two of you, testing out your comeback speed, how fast your brains could process and reciprocate snide remarks, eventually flashing shit-eating grins at each other, and wilfully flat-out refusing to concede to the other’s language. He garbled at you in Earth English while you barked back at him in Alternian. It was the _strangest_ conversation you’d ever gotten swept up in, and you guess that’s what made it exciting.  
  
John, the interloper, had been the only human to join your group of would-be cadets in military training. You’d never been sure how he managed it and never asked, but you do know that he was respectful enough to treat you like an equal when your eye color did eventually betray you and people started changing their minds about you - you’d lost a lot of comrades once the grey became red, and you probably would have had a way harder time with the heavy-handed scrutiny if he hadn’t been around. After the Big Fucking Reveal and the fortunate decision from your superior officers to not to kick you out of training altogether, you got used to being regularly assigned as his right-hand during simulations, because a human and a mutant being stuck together seemed to make the most sense at the time. Even you couldn’t deny how much you complimented one another, though, with your similar professional perfectionism but contrasting personalities and approaches to your tasks. He grew on you way too quickly, which was something you didn’t ever expect a member of his species to accomplish in such record time considering how unapproachable your repellent ass had been toward him, and he also ultimately taught you over time that you were a little too judgemental of other aliens, especially when first meeting them.  
  
It culminated to a point where you’d actually thought about maybe trying to pale-court him, moronically enough, because as far as you could tell he would have been a pretty model moirail for you. Of course, you predictably fucked the entire idea up and threw it into the unwanted-waste compactor before you even had a chance to do anything about it. You’re a notoriously horrible suitor - you always underestimate, you always second-guess, and in the end you _always_ wait too long, overlooking the fact until it’s too late that people aren’t just going to wait around for you to make up your mind. Instead of bulging-up and facing the fact that your flighty fucking personality might be the problem, you pass the blame on to your bloodline; nobody can uphold attractive confidence and spotless self-esteem when they’ve spent the latter half of their adolescence being ridiculed, humiliated, and smacked around. Not that you were expecting someone as congenial as John to do that to you, but it didn’t matter anyway. Your cold feet very quickly snuffed the small flame out.  
  
You tried your best, on both sides, to keep in contact with each other once you went your separate ways and joined different fleets, but that communication gradually dropped off until it was just an infrequent check-in every once in a while. 

This was your first time physically seeing him in person in about half of a solar sweep, and as it turned out, he’d grown up with this other human, this _Dave_. They’d known each other for almost their entire lives. John had become the common bridge that sealed the remainder of space between the two of you.

All in all, the party hadn’t been as much of a gargantuan time suck as you thought it to be. You reconnected with John, you met Dave, and you’d made up your mind before the night was even over that you were going to put in your request for a transfer to their fleet. It was granted with little resistance, of course. You knew some of your higher-ranked officers probably scrambled all over each other like desperate, slobbering barkbeasts for the opportunity to sign off on the approval notice and kick you the fuck off of their ship. They didn’t have to be plagued by the stain you spilled all over their reputation anymore. John and Dave couldn’t have cared less about their ‘reputation’, or the hemospectrum, or your red bloodline, or your even redder eyes.  
  
Especially Dave, with his own unusual eyes. Eyes that calmly and attentively watched you from across his quarters the night you finally explained to him what a mutated troll anomaly was, and how your species apparently still hadn’t been fucking smart enough to evolve out of pretending mutants didn’t exist in their society or outcasting them as an Out Of Sight Out Of Thinkpan tactic. Eyes that fell into quiet consideration for a beat when you let the subject taper off because talking about it, even to a human, still felt shameful and taboo. Eyes that he lightly joked were, with their similar coloring and their asymmetrical pupil sizes, a ‘mutation’ of his own. You weren’t sure what response he was aiming to get out of you, but you don’t think anyone had ever presented you open acceptance and camaraderie in such a peculiar and comforting way before.

Was this really the dumbshit you’d once thought you could easily develop intense caliginous feelings for?

That was indisputably the night that Dave, Dave Strider and those stupid, lopsided, enigmatic fucking eyes, took up a vacancy in your life that you never had an excuse to pay any attention to before. He bore a hole straight into you and curled up inside of it, and you didn’t know it at the time but his inhabitancy, whether you wanted it there or not, would never fully waste away.

  
***

  
At first, things seem like they could be at least moderately tolerable tonight. 

Maybe.  
  
No snide remarks have been growled in your direction yet, and you’re taking that as a good sign that at _least_ the social part of the night could let you off the hook and give you one less thing to worry yourself to death over.  
  
… maybe.

You’d chosen this fleet to transfer to in the first place because it was open to human personnel, and since you bleed the same as them, you figured that you could find a minimally less abrasive and oppressive group to scrape by with. While that has mostly been true, your return from your little pilgrimage is not, by any stretch of the imagination, exactly _welcome_. The treatment in the foyer, with those narrow-eyed resentful glances from literally anyone above the *BUOY spectrum, does carry over into the lounge, but it's way more muted for the sake of respecting The Condesce’s choice (because everything always really comes down to her decision and direction) to put you where you are, despite how much they hate you for it. The whiplash you feel from the whole thing is nauseating and it takes a lot to not just turn and walk right the fuck back out.

Speaking of humans. Good. Your _favorite_ subject.

You see John first, only because he’s facing your direction. In any ‘normal’ circumstance, this would be the part where you gravitate to him and greet him, maybe feel a little embarrassed as you comment on how… _healthy_? Is that what humans like to hear?... he looks after so many years of not seeing one another, grumble out a forced but genuine apology for not reaching out from your end more often, tolerate him yammering away at you about everything you missed while you were gone with agonizing detail. You’d actually like it if you could do that. It _seems_ like The Right Thing to do.  
  
Except right now, it _seems_ like it’s Not Going to Fucking Happen.

Immediately in front of him is the back of a blonde head and if there is a blonde in John’s company, it is almost always going to be only one specific person. It’s more obvious because they’re at the bar and that blonde already has two empty glasses in front of him. So fucking par for the course. You’d like to have hoped that maybe the stupid piece of shit at _least_ cut back on poisoning himself into oblivion, but it looks like nothing’s really changed.

Next thing you know, John is coming toward you and you freeze for a second, not sure if you should snap to professional attention or greet him like the friend he still is. 

“Wow,” he says when he gets to you, and there is zero enthusiasm there - instead, it sounds like he’s forcing the word up like vomit from the pit of his nutrient pouch. He’s smiling, but it’s one of those smiles that you’ve seen him use when he doesn’t feel like it, but also doesn’t want to be rude. The thought of that kills something small and pitiful inside of you. This is what you’ve become. “Karkat.”

You heard down the line that he managed to get promoted while you were gone, and you can tell because it’s changed his demeanor enough for you to notice. The scrappy immaturity that he had when you last saw him isn’t there anymore. He stands taller, walks with more confidence even through really obvious discomfort, _holds_ himself differently somehow. It makes you wonder, for a second, if you look different to him, too.  
  
Like hell you’re going to let him in on just how disheartened his reaction to you made you feel, so instead, you try to stand up taller too (doesn’t fucking do anything, you will always have to look up at him) and your eyebrows draw together a little.

“ _Wow_?” you scoff indignantly, though there’s not a lot of heat behind it. “Thanks. Decently enjoyable to see you, too, you ass.”  
  
You’re feeling surly, but this is, has been, and probably always will be normal for you in John’s eyes. He’s never known a different You. A little light finally creeps into his smile, like you doing something so at-home to him and familiar even after all this time eases the unpleasant start that your reunion just had.  
  
“Sorry,” he says sheepishly. Maybe he is, but only a little. “I’m not used to seeing you so dressed up.”  
  
Okay, so you _do_ look different to him.  
  
You allow your shoulders to droop and your stance to relax a little, and it’s a nice break from feeling like you’re skulking around with a bone bulge straight up your ass.  
  
“Not my choice,” you grumble, and you could swear that at least fifty percent of his smile is finally genuine now.  
  
“I figured it wasn’t. It looks good on you, though!”  
  
You fix him with a flat, pointed glare. It’s almost a little scary how easy it is to swing back into the same routine around him like you just saw him a few hours ago instead of what he would call ‘six years’.  
  
“Great,” you respond, suddenly feeling a little self-conscious again. “Good to know it looks better than it feels.”  
  
He _actually_ looks nice in his new uniform. You are not going to say that to him directly. It also looks comfortable on him, and you envy him for it. You aren’t going to say _that_ to him, either.  
  
“It comes with the territory.” He talks to you like you crawled up to your rank just yesterday. “You’ll get used to it pretty fast.”  
  
“Egbert,” you say dryly. “I’ve been a Thresh Commander for over half a sweep now, idiot. I _am_ used to it, I just hate it.”  
  
“Oh, shit, you’re right. That went by fast.”  
  
You bite back the natural impulse to roll your fucking eyes at him. “Says you.”  
  
He fidgets awkwardly in place for a second before reaching up to rub the back of his neck. “Listen,” he says. You can’t stand how humans tend to kick off difficult conversations like that, you _are_ already fucking listening. “Just so you’re not surprised, Dave is here.”  
  
“I’m aware,” you reply, shifting one hand behind your back to tighten your claws against your palm. You reflexively glance over his shoulder toward where he just came from, and there is a momentary severe tightening in your throat that almost makes you feel physically sick.  
  
He’s looking at you.  
  
You frown and center your attention back on John.  
  
“Still angry at me, huh?” you ask, and you’ve dropped your voice like anyone else around you is dying to hear more about your torrid, scandalous past with some nobody-human.  
  
John winces. You squint expectantly at him. Cough it up, Egbert, you’re not a fucking grub. You can handle it.  
  
Can’t you?  
  
When he still doesn’t seem to know how to cheerfully say ‘yes’ to you, you let out the breath you’d been inadvertently holding. It sounds way more explosive than you mean it to.  
  
“Are you fucking serious?” Your voice has a dark bite to it. “ _Still_?”  
  
“Dude,” he says quickly, and you wonder how many times he’s played and planned this mediation shit out in the ablution trap on his own before now. “A lot of stuff happened with you.”  
  
Motherfucker _please_ , he better not be placing all of the blame for that ingloriously dysfunctional phase of your life completely on your shoulders. He was there and he saw what happened. That’s not fucking fair.  
  
“And a lot of _stuff_ happened with him, too,” you hiss defensively.

He visibly backs off a little. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “I know. I’m sorry. This wasn’t how I wanted this to go.”  
  
 _No shit_ , you think, and cross your arms across your chest. You don’t say anything back, just lift an eyebrow at him because he’s reverting to old bad habits and making everything all about him.  
  
He must catch on because he sighs. “Alright, no, here. Let’s start over.” He squares himself up and the look of forced concentration on his face really bothers you for some reason. “Hi, Karkat.”  
  
“Hello, John.”  
  
“How have you been?”  
  
“Just fucking wonderful.” This is painful, enough of this. “Can we end this here?”  
  
He lets out a wry laugh. “Okay, okay, fine.”  
  
You look over his shoulder again before you can find the will to stop yourself. Dave’s not looking anymore. His back is turned to you and he has _yet another fucking drink_ in his hand.  
  
John twists around a little to follow your gaze, and you almost - almost - feel a little bit of sympathy for him. He really is trying. He just doesn’t know what he’s doing, or how he’s supposed to be doing it.  
  
“If you wanted,” he offers when he looks back down (down, fucking _ugh_ ) at you. “We could go over there together and see if things smooth out?”

Something in you bristles pretty intensely at this. What he’s trying to do here feels _very_ close to attempted auspisticism to you, and that is dangerous territory for him to be tiptoeing around in. This situation does not even come within an inch of feeling ashen - at its base foundation, that would take three consensual partners who understand and respect the intentions and boundaries of the relationship, and you certainly don’t fucking remember ever agreeing to any such thing between these two chucklefucks. The only reason you don’t rip into him for it is because you know that he doesn’t comprehend what his suggestion insinuates and why you would consider that insinuation profoundly offensive.  
  
That doesn’t make you feel any less affronted, though.  
  
So instead of responding to him, you nudge around him with firm intent, unwilling to hear any objections or arguments, and march your ruffled ass directly toward the bar.  
  
You’re not ready to do this.  
  
You’re going to do it, anyway.  
  


________________________  
*Burgundy, Umber, Ocher, Yellowgreen; a term for lowbloods.


	3. Strider - 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What are you supposed to think about,” you say, almost immediately regretting that this is the way you’re bringing this up right out the fucking gate. “when you get to feeling like you’re on the razor’s edge of intense military unrest?”
> 
> That sounded super stupid to you, but to your genuine surprise, Karkat visibly blanches.
> 
> Looks like you haven’t been alone in this, after all.

**S T R I D E R**

**[ 8 Years Earlier ]**  
  
  
You always wonder what it might be like to share quarters with Karkat.

You think he’s probably kind of a neat freak, real particular about where his shit is and whether or not you’ve put your dirty paws on any of it without his permission. Even though he’s a loudmouth, he’s surprisingly private about a lot of stuff, so maybe he doesn’t leave anything incriminating out anyway - you know, anything that might give more of an insight to who he is, how he feels, et cetera. 

If you know him well enough, in this imaginary scenario, he probably _hates_ when you get a weird second wind at night and make any level of noise doing anything while he’s flumped into his sleepy-pod, soaking in his own troll soup and trying to sleep. He probably snaps a lot and loses his temper really fast. He does that anyway, even as Not A Roommate - you imagine it’s magnified ten-fold when you’re getting on his last delicate, fraying nerves while stanking up his own personal space.

He just has so many buttons to push. So, _so_ many buttons. And you _love_ pushing them, sometimes more than one at a time if you’re feeling especially feisty. You can’t help it – they’re all so big and shiny and ragey and while most people might find him super fucking off-putting when he’s getting angry, you think it’s hilarious and kind of endearing. You’ve learned over the past year not to push too hard, though, because your goal isn’t to overstimulate him - it’s to get under his skin _just enough_. You’d like to think that you’ve gotten good at polishing your self-restraint - you almost lost the chance at friendship with the mercurial little hematoma right from the jump and it took a really precarious tightrope walk backwards to keep that from happening. The guys in the clang chamber have acted like a good prep school to handle someone with Karkat’s short fuse, though. They’ve also been good test subjects to see how far you’ll allow yourself to go before you hit the ‘too far’ window ledge. Karkat has a personalized threshold when it comes to his tolerance of you - it’s a day to day gachapon and almost entirely depends on what side of the goopy space-pod he shlurped out of that morning.

He reminds you of a kitten, cliché as it sounds. Coming at you all sideways when he’s in a crap mood and you’ve managed to pet him the wrong way, with his hair fuzzed and his back arched and his claws out for no reason because he’s not likely to use them. Aiming for intimidating but always managing to blow _way_ past it into so cute that you want to rip his face off.

…why do really cute things make you want to be, like, _insanely_ violent sometimes? There’s got to be a chemical that gets farted out in your brain when you don’t know how to handle it or something.

You would be his worst nightmare as a roommate.

The first roommate he had, you didn’t know too much about. He was a puny cadet, a lower blood – bronze, maybe? – but he’d been against rooming with a mutant from day one and tried to avoid him during their short stint together whenever he could. He was one of the only low bloods to your knowledge who still honestly thought that he was saving face with his superiors by sticking really solidly to his prejudice and pretending Karkat didn’t even exist. Guy tried _two times_ to get a transfer to another room – the first one was predictably denied, because no matter how hard and far he tried to ram his head desperately up into some highblood ass, he was still pretty low on the bloodline totem pole. The second one was only approved when John – sweet, wonderful little bastard that he is – figured out what was going on and decided ‘fuck no, not MY friend, bitch’ and stepped in. His roomie at the time was a gold (humans always get bunked up with lower bloods, that’s just the way shit works) so Karkat’s new friend was quick to agree and take the opportunity, probably all but _begged_ the superiors to give it the green light. He’d be moving to a room with someone who was one color up from him, and he wouldn’t have to worry about an angry little troll x-man making him look bad by sharing a space with him. Not that he even looked _good_ to anyone in the first place, so the whole kerfuffle was just so fucking stupid and pointless.  
  
You almost intervened in the process several times, but even _you_ would lose your damn cool if you tried, that’s how ridiculous it all was. And god forbid you lose your cool.

Either way, it was a win-win. The douchenugget got what he wanted, and there was an air of palpable relief that just absolutely engulfed Karkat when John finally moved in with him. At least he could finally co-exist harmoniously with someone instead of keeping eyes in the back of his head or going to bed lonely and demeaned. He’d never admit it in a million years to your face, but his feelings are super sensitive. That’s why he protects them with such an abrasive shell - they get hurt really easily. You’ve seen it happen first-hand dozens of times. Breaks your damn heart.

 _Your_ current roommate has been bunked up with you since before you even met Karkat, at least a couple of years before. You like the guy - yellow-blooded, lispy, super smart and weird, but the good kind of weird. You think maybe he was the first fellow engineer you really actually befriended (most likely because you were essentially shacked up together, but you’d like to think it was also because of your magnetic and irresistible personality) and you’ve always lived together totally peacefully.  
  
He was the one who helped you get more familiar with troll habits and customs - something he probably felt like he _had_ to do, on account of you having to see his scrawny buck-naked ass haul itself into a fucking big, crazy metal cocoon filled with _who the fuck knows what_ in the corner of your room on a nightly basis. Karkat has huffily insisted that it’s a very organic strain of slime that seeps into a troll’s pores like a kind of detox-bath and sedative (but don’t eat it, never ever eat it - you’re assuming because it’d be like taking fourteen Ambien pills at once or something), and you’ve just had to accept it and be like “Okay, bud, cool” before he got his damn hackles up too high _again_.

Setting aside your curious fascination with the anatomical side of that nightly routine (you weren’t looking in a creepy way, you _swear_ , but after so many nights in the same room it was inevitable that you would be seeing his fiddly-bits and hoo-boy are they a _thing_ ), you learned a lot about their history and culture. He explained things to you in a way that didn’t make you feel like a complete dumbass and never hinged your uneducated questions just on ‘being human’. He equated them, rightfully so, to simple curiosity and an interest in learning. You appreciated that. Those tutoring sessions played a _massive_ part in helping you to properly weave around Karkat’s many landmines.  
  
He also introduced you to quadrants. Those crazy, crazy quadrants. That, you think, was the toughest thing to wrap your head around. You have full knowledge and no qualms whatsoever with humans having their own flavors of the same concepts - ace and polyam come to mind above anything, despite your admittedly crude and rudimentary understanding of them. You’d just personally never had the inclination to explore any of it. The actual connections that made the most sense to you were the pale besties and the red-crushes, so at the time, that was fine with you and the deeper and more complicated aspects of being directly _involved_ with any of them wasn’t really an important thing to bother wrapping your head around.  
  
At the time.  
  
You know you’re truly clueless when your roommate notices shit about you changing before you do.  
  
He likes to nudge you about it, too, the prick.  
  
“Tell your shit-for-brains boyfriend I say hi,” he’d snipe from across the room as you’re heading out to the door, grinning his sharp teeth at you because he’s an antagonistic donkey.

And you would respond with a casual but very pointed middle finger and say, “Rotate good and hard on it, Captor.”

Karkat is not _that word._

But part of you likes hearing it tested out on someone else’s tongue.  
  
  
 ******

  
This isn’t one of those long, drawn-out pining stories. 

Not yet, at least. 

If you’re anything at all (aside from awesome, duh), it’s honest about your fee-fees. You don’t see a point in denial because the only thing that does is cause some major emotional damage further down the road. You stopped trying to hide or cover shit up by the time you were a younger teenager, and you learned that respecting your damn self wasn’t a sign of weakness or conceit. If you didn’t have your back, who the fuck else would?

You’ve learned this in the worst possible way from your brother. 

He was a bastard, no doubt, but in his own deranged and admittedly abusive way, he gave you a lot of physical and mental preparation for being in the Alternian military long-term, even as just one of the cockroaches crawling around in the butthole of the ship. You don’t appreciate him for it - in fact, you still have a nasty grudge the size of your own home state on Earth - but you can at _least_ acknowledge that a lot of (what you feel are) your stronger and more self-preserving traits are thanks to him. 

‘Thanks’. Haha. That’s being pretty generous.

Point being, you are not about to deny that you’ve had it pretty bad for Karkat’s tactless ass from the first night you met him.  
  
Your ship isn’t the biggest - or the nicest, or the newest - but you can at least find things to do to ease any in-flight dead time. There’s a sparring room that also doubles as a really crappy gym, a couple of common areas, a spacenet room (not usually occupied too often, considering everyone has their own laptops or husktops that can connect in their rooms), and a small kind of dining-ish area where literally nobody ever hangs out because… _why_?  
  
Your favorite room to dick around in when you need company or mental incitement is John and Karkat’s quarters.  
  
Karkat used to give a shit about you buzzing around his head like a mosquito for a little while, but over time he’s gotten used to you kind of constantly being around. While he was resistant to you for the most part at first - not to say he disliked you (because you know he didn’t, not really), you just _have a way_ about you that grinds his gears - he’s been soothed down to dull annoyance, the kind that comes and goes and allows you to still carry on conversations without him threatening to strangle you. That’s you, Dave Strider - growing slowly on people like a fungus.

He’s holed up in his room a lot, mainly because his work keeps him pretty busy at his desk most days. When there isn’t any fun science-guy ecto-stuff for him to do, he’s mostly what would be considered an administrative peon, if anyone higher up cared enough about him to even let him have a title in that regard. Whenever he’s at that desk, he never has less than four digital tablets in front of him. His posture fucking sucks because he’s always hunched over the desktop. 

That’s how you find him, his door open enough to maybe indicate that a possible interruption might not be the worst thing to happen to him. Either that, or John left it open because he likes to socialize, and Karkat is just putting up with it because he’s stuck working, anyway.

“Knock knock,” you say loudly, because he has earpods in and he wouldn’t hear a _physical_ knock over whatever (what you’re sure is) angry screamy music he’s decided to calmly work to tonight. John isn't in the room. It’s not like Karkat to leave himself up for _this_ much distraction while he’s dick-deep in work, but hey. Gift horse, won’t look it in the mouth.

The door is adjacent to the right side of his work station, so he only looks up for a second with a raised eyebrow before looking back down at his work.

To his credit, he lifts a hand to press a button on one of the earpods and pause whatever he’s listening to. You consider that a win.

He just grunts back at you. He’s not great at greetings.  
  
“Hey, sunshine,” you say as you push all the way into the room and move to his left side (never linger behind him, he _can’t stand_ that), resisting the urge to sit your ass right down onto his desk. He already seems high-strung enough. Remember, there’s a threshold. “Still working, huh?”  
  
“Fucking expense reports,” he responds distractedly, still not looking back at you. He’s scrolling through something on one of the tablets with the pad of his finger in a fascinatingly delicate way that keeps his claw from touching the screen. “They take forever.”  
  
You snort and lean your hip against the wall next to the desk, shoving your hands into your pockets. “What, you’re an accountant now, too?”

He shrugs so imperceptibly that the movement comes more from his shoulder blade than his shoulder. “What am I _not_.” He pauses, and his scrolling pauses, too. His voice lowers to the type of half-assed growl that he uses when he’s pretending to intimidate you, but is too tired for the real motivation behind it to properly stick. “Don’t you dare say ‘a soldier’ because I will literally paint the walls with your brain.”

“Easy, boy,” you drawl casually, because this is a mask you can see behind real keenly by now. “I’d never.”

He knows you’re telling the truth. You’ve never given him shit about his position. What he’s doing right now is relying on one of his many defense mechanisms, probably because he’s just overly stressed and exhausted.

 _Because_ he knows you’re being genuine, you hear and see him draw in a slow, long breath. He lets it out just as slowly. He absolutely loathes throwing you a bone, but much to his disappointment, you aren’t _always_ the wrong party. “I’m going to be busy for the next couple of hours,” he informs you. “Do you need something, or are you just here to distract me and piss me off?”

“ _Obviously_ here to distract you and piss you off,” you reply. When he glances up at you, you smirk at him.

He rolls his eyes and slowly pushes back from the desk a little, removing his earpods and tossing them across one of the tablet screens. “Fine,” he mutters, turning his chair to face you. “I’d rather listen to your tongue flap nonsense at me for the next ten minutes than keep doing this brainless bullshit.”

He crosses one leg over the other irritably, leans back in the chair with his hands resting, fingers laced, over his abdomen, and stares at you with agitated expectation. You take a second to soul-suck from that agitation and unabashedly check the apoplectic creampuff out - you have your glasses on, though, so maybe it’s not _that_ unabashed. He probably knows you’re doing it, anyway, He’s gotten used to that part of your company, too.

Karkat is hot, y’all. Maybe it’s just because you’re a _lowly human_ , but damn. Even by human standards, the guy has always been particularly pleasant on the eyes - he wears a lot of black, and it accentuates the tightly packed muscles in his skinny torso, and even though his pissy face is always Looking Upset somehow, it’s still what you’d consider handsome, in its own literally alien way. His facial features are really just _sharp_ \- jawline, cheekbones, the points of his ears, it all falls together really nicely.

He’s just one of those assholes who doesn’t need to put any effort into himself to look good. Good to _you,_ anyway; good enough to wanna get your hands in his hair and grab him by the wimpy chicken nuggets on his head that he calls ‘horns’ and just…

Mm, you get the point.

Alas, you’ve tried flirting and have gotten some very blatant resistance, and you’re smart enough to know not to push. You wouldn’t continue with that level of non-consensual harassment on _anyone,_ because that shit is no good, but you imagine it’d be especially worse on someone as emotionally volatile as Karkat is. It’d be like opening a vein in front of a fucking shark.

“That’s dangerous,” you tell him. “I can flap this tongue for hours.”

You’d love it if he caught on to the innuendo that you are so clearly making, but of course, all he does is let the muscles around his eyes relax - not squinting, not glaring, just kind of tiredly _looking._ He ain’t amused. Oh well.

“I literally just told you that I don’t have hours, you dipshit,” he rumbles at you, and you can clearly hear the mental fatigue in his voice. You almost (...almost) feel sorry for bugging him.  
  
“How long have you even been sitting here?” you ask. 

He doesn’t answer you, just blinks real slowly at you on purpose. That tells you enough, and you shake your head a little. “Man, maybe you should say something.” _Now_ he glares, the corners of his eyes pinching tightly, so you back it up a little. “No, I’m serious. I’m a fuckin’ engineer and I’m not even working nearly as much as you are. Are you literally the only one doing this kind of shit?”  
  
He lifts and drops one shoulder. “Probably. This might shock you, but I haven’t found the best fucking opportunity to ask.”  
  
“I’m just confused why they haven’t caved and got themselves a human or something to do this kind of back-office garbage for them. I’m sure there are plenty out there looking for work like this.”  
  
“Yeah, well, this way the fleet doesn’t have to pay a single extra credit to get this - '' He actually air-quotes, here, with extremely hard and exaggerated (you’re sure it would easily offend _someone_ ) mockery. “ - ‘back-office garbage’ done. Why pay someone when you have a mutant barkbeast to kick around? Humans are greedy enough fucks as it is.”  
  
He’s not wrong.  
  
“And Alternians are stingy with their cash,” you grin back.  
  
A sour ‘tsk’ hisses out over his tongue. “ _Highblood_ Alternians, asshole. Stop forgetting to specify that kind of thing when you’re in the special mood to talk shit about us.”  
  
You lift a lazily placating hand. “I know, I know,” you concede. “I just think they’re wasting the opportunity to train up a good soldier, that’s all.” This is something you’ve thought about a lot, to be honest. You’ve seen the guy in action. You’ve sparred with him plenty of times. His reflexes are insane, he’s fast as hell, and once he gets his mind into the ‘Tear and Shred and Kill’ trance, it’s _really_ hard to distract him back out of it. You wouldn’t say he could necessarily kick your ass into oblivion, but he also has teeth and claws and decades of pent up self-righteous rage to his advantage.  
  
Strange enough, some of the only times you’ve really seen him genuinely happy is when he’s getting the upper hand in a sparring match. There’s some baggage in that, you think, and you acknowledge that it’s probably not really your place to attempt breaking into it. You’re only disrespectful when it’s _funny_ , not when it could shatter him or get you killed in the process.  
  
A nerve has still been hit, apparently. His eyes kind of float over your shoulder and he glowers at the nothing behind you. There are some self-deprecating wheels turning in that stormy head of his and he’s probably trying as hard as possible to physically wedge his tongue between his teeth and hold himself back from letting it verbally barf out of his mouth.  
  
Instead, a sharp breath explodes out of his nose. “I don’t want to fucking talk about this anymore.”  
  
“Consider it closed, baby,” you respond. His gaze flicks back to yours disapprovingly at the pet name. He doesn’t like those, they embarrass him. That’s why you use them on him.  
  
“You can leave, if you don’t actually have anything substantial to offer me right now.”

He wants substantial? Fine. He gets substantial. You didn’t just waltz in here to fluff up his feathers - you’d been looking for John, but hashing this particular _thing_ on your mind out with Karkat is a perfect enough alternative.  
  
The topic hasn’t made its way through the engineering room _too_ far, but you catch it being mumbled about enough for it to germinate the little seed that you’ve planted in your own brain, from your own observations. Your ship hasn’t docked for almost a full month and you’ve noticed that the higher-ups have been a lot jumpier lately. Things feel… _funky._ There’s an energy in the fleet that you’ve been tentative to bring up to anyone else until now because you don’t wanna be one of the dumbfucks starting rumors and causing low-key panic for what _could_ be no reason.

“I actually did wanna talk to you about something for a sec,” you admit, and at least this time you aren’t flat-out lying when you say it.

You hesitate for only a few seconds and the impatient fucker raises both eyebrows at you and juts his chin out, like he’s saying ‘And?’

You move to sit down on John’s bed beside where you’re leaning. Something about this movement catches Karkat’s deeper attention and those eyebrows shift again, this time meeting in the middle worriedly. 

Forget finding John. If there’s anyone you can start a discussion about all the weird shit you’ve been noticing, Karkat’s your guy. He doesn’t have the interest or (let’s be honest) the popularity to spread baseless gossip. He’s a safe choice.

“Do you think something might be… Idunno, brewing?” you ask, and gesture vaguely in the air with one hand. “You know, around? In the ranks?”

You couldn’t have made that any more fucking vague, but he doesn’t need to root around for the Point - he latches immediately.

“What are you talking about?” he responds. His voice has far less of a bite to it now. He’s taking you seriously; you can say whatever you want about him being a notorious grouchbag, but you have to give him credit - when something is honestly going down or shit has even the slightest possibility of hitting the fan, he changes. He’s dialed in and attentive. At least he has enough faith in you to know when you might need to start getting real with him, despite how often you tease and fool around with him. He can sense it really keenly; he’s good at reading subtle changes in body language.

You have a weird suspicion that he’s noticed the exact same things you have, and has just been waiting for someone else to bring it up.

He doesn’t even seem pissed that the ‘someone’ is you.

You rest your elbows on your knees. Unexpectedly, he mirrors you, planting both feet on the floor and leaning forward in his chair to do the same. A selfish part of you sometimes wishes that serious stuff would happen more often, because you like having his attention on you like this. It’s nice when he’s not half-assedly hating on you.  
  
Now that you _have_ his attention, though, how the hell are you supposed to word what you’re thinking without sounding like a big paranoid baby?

This is the first time you’ve talked about this out loud, so you just kinda go with the first thing that materializes in your head.

“What are you supposed to think about,” you say, almost immediately regretting that this is the way you’re bringing this up right out the fucking gate. “when you get to feeling like you’re on the razor’s edge of intense military unrest?”

That sounded super stupid to you, but to your genuine surprise, Karkat visibly blanches.  
  
Looks like you haven’t been alone in this, after all.


	4. Vantas - 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You aren’t sure what aggravates you more, you think as you methodically and gloomily wind the gauze around your knuckles - the fact that John just beat you half to death with his skepticism and made you feel stupid, or the fact that the only dickwad in the entire galaxy who’s even close to being on your side is Dave fucking Strider.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First, I just wanted to extend a thank-you to those of you who have been encouraging and supportive of this story so far! It has been legitimately awesome getting back into the rhythm of writing, and I’m glad there are some ‘someones’ out there who are enjoying the results.
> 
> Secondly, to avoid confusion, I wanted to clarify that the story is going to time-jump a couple of times – I’ll be sure to make it obvious when we’re moving forward to “present day” again. We’ll be stuck in the past for a little bit longer. :)

**V A N T A S**

It’s a week after your tense conversation with Dave and you still can’t manage to keep your thoughts still.  
  
As much as you’d love to just be done with it and blame that walking swamp of endless perturbance for feeling unnecessarily _even more_ distracted, sleep-deprived, wary and erratic than usual since that discussion, you know - fucking begrudgingly, thank you very much - that you realistically can’t. Which is just your luck, because you really don’t like being strong-armed into shouldering half of the accountability for a shitty situation with someone else, let alone someone like Dave. You felt the same thing that he did to begin with; you’re not off the hook. 

Just because you can finally _just barely_ tolerate his presence around you (at what feels agonizingly like all hours of every day), that doesn’t mean you have to treat him like you’re ready to pale-crush all over him. Sure, you can’t help but feel a small, resentful ounce of kinship with him because you happen to be in the same boat as him, but you are not on your _black fucking soul_ about to hold hands with him while you both take a flying leap into complete, dedicated camaraderie.  
  
Morbid curiosity to know more about everything be damned, the whole fucking situation (your feelings and thoughts about Dave included) has been giving you nothing but a persistent, gigantic nightmare of a stress headache.  
  
You’re on your back on John’s bed while he browses the spacenet at his desk, one of your legs dangling over the side and the ball of your foot subconsciously tapping a slow, unsteady rhythm against the floor. You barge further into his personal space like this every once in awhile because sometimes you just need to _fucking rest_ for a few minutes, but don’t want to be lulled to sleep yet. Recuperacoons aren’t designed for something like idle ‘relaxation’, so you’re lucky that your roommate likes and trusts you enough to let you use his bed to just lay down and zone out.  
  
You’ve been uselessly staring at the ceiling for the better part of half an hour, one hand pillowing the back of your head and the other distractedly picking at the fabric of your shirt over your ribcage. It’s hard to put a pin in exactly what you’ve been thinking about this whole time because your idiot mind won’t pick a fucking target and stick with it.  
  
To be honest, you could have gone the rest of your life without having to speak up about the weird vibe you’ve been getting around here lately. You’ve been chalking it up, as you always do, to your own nightmarishly heightened paranoia; you’re pretty used to being gaslit, even by your own self, into believing that you’re blowing shit way, _way_ out of proportion the second you lift a fucking eyebrow at it, so why would this situation have been any different? If anyone else was noticing anything, they either didn’t want to believe it themselves or they didn’t trust you enough to talk to you about it.  
  
Except for Dave. Dave trusted you enough. Fuck knows why. 

Actually, no, that’s wrong. It does make sense, you guess - if anyone else is going to see how things really are through the same lens that you do in this piss-sodden, sorry excuse for a fleet, it’d be a human. And if anyone was going to listen to a human about this and take him seriously, why not the infamous mutant scum?

… what the hell _are_ you supposed to think about when you feel like you’re on the razor’s edge of intense military unrest?  
  
“Are you in a pit?”  
  
You turn your head to the side a little and look at John, who’s craned around in his desk chair with his elbow resting on the back of it, watching you. Who the hell could tell how long he’s been doing that.

You frown at him slightly. “What?”

“You know,” he says - _no, stupid, I very obviously don’t,_ you immediately want to snap back at him - and you can tell by his tone that he’s trying to sound as casual as possible and is going just a little overboard with it. “A thought-pit. You’ve been quiet for awhile, and that’s weird for you.”  
  
You’d feel offended by that jab if it wasn’t absolutely on target.  
  
“It’s not a _pit_ ,” you say, not sure why you feel a twinge of vague displeasure at the term. It sounds oddly wrong. “I’m just thinking.”  
  
He gives you a crooked smile. You’re struck with an alarmingly sudden urge to punch it because it’s obviously meant to make a joke out of you, but that urge subsides almost just as quickly as it came on because it’s John, and he’s one of the only people (if not the only person) you know who genuinely doesn’t actually _deserve_ a punch in the face.

“Yeah,” he says. “Thinking is usually what you do when you’re in a thought-pit.”  
  
You rescind that last thought about punching him. Fuck this nerd.  
  
“Ha ha,” you drone back, wholly unamused. “You’re so _funny,_ how did you get so _funny,_ you funny fucking motherfucker?” 

He huffs out a quick breath of a laugh, probably at the unexpected volatility in your response - you regularly forget that not everybody can see through your thick skull and instantly understand the angry, self-deprecating six degrees of separation that goes on in your brain at a near constant basis. He wasn’t making fun of you just now. But that’s how you took it, because _why wouldn’t you,_ and your knee-jerk emotional auto-response kicked in. Like it always fucking does.

That’s you, Karkat Vantas, always taking the nastiest reaction to anything, putting it selfishly on yourself, and running with it.

You really are unfixable, aren’t you?

You turn back to the ceiling, lifting your hand from your torso to pinch tightly between your eyebrows with your index finger and thumb, habitually mindful of your claws being so close to your eyes. The pressure momentarily soothes the nagging fucker of an ache threatening to bloom there. “Even if I _was_ in a - “ You air-quote (sort of) above your face with all the rest of the fingers on the same hand that aren’t trying to squeeze the pain out of the bridge of your nose. “-‘pit’, could you actually blame me?”  
  
You talked to John about The Topic a few days ago, and you were a bit surprised that Dave hadn’t thought to get to him first. Though he hasn’t exactly noticed the same thing that the two of you apparently have, he did agree that there seems to be some tension hovering around where it really never used to be. That’s enough to nail down your suspicions - if three of you are trusting your gut that something is _off,_ then that just leads you to believe that it actually is. And that really troubles you.  
  
You’re not used to being _troubled._ Bothered, yes - you are bothered pretty fucking frequently, by a wide buffet of things and places and people and noises. But _troubled._ Troubled leaves you with a really uncomfortable, sick feeling in your stomach.  
  
John spares a quick glance to the door, probably to make sure it’s shut. It is.

“Look,” he says, spinning in his chair to face you fully. “You and Dave have both come to me with this but neither of you gave me any specifics. What, _exactly_ , have you seen? Or heard?”

You almost react with exaggerated vexation over having to repeat the whole shitshow to him, but then you realize in the same instant that you’d never given him actual information, just observations. You’re assuming by his question that Dave hasn’t done so, either. Maybe you were banking on him beating you to the punch. If that’s the case, you can plainly see that he didn’t. 

“It’s…” 

You stop. This is a vulnerable situation for you, and you try to piece your scattered thoughts together into a fully-formed shape. 

“It’s like…” 

You hate this, when your brain and your mouth won’t coexist harmoniously. You sit up on the bed and barrel through it, regardless. 

“It’s like people don’t think you’re listening, because you aren’t noticed to begin with. Because, you know,” You distract yourself by continuing to massage the space between your eyebrows with your index finger. ‘Distract’. You’re not distracted, you’re stalling. _Knock that the fuck off._ “You’re completely forgettable. Unimportant,” you say after a long breath. “I see and hear what I shouldn’t, whether I want to or not, because nobody remembers that I’m around. I thought I was possibly overreacting until Dave came to me and asked me if I noticed anything. That’s when I got nervous. Not much can drill deep enough into that fucking thick, fatheaded cranium of his to really get under his skin, so if _he_ feels like things don’t feel right, it’s probably something worth being cautious about.”

You stop and chew on the inside of your cheek, habitually. It’s a really dumb habit. Dumb, because you have razor sharp incisors. The faint taste of copper creeps into your mouth and you ignore it. Literally swallow it back. The usual. Happens a lot.

“I heard somebody mention restocking, going for heavier artillery with the next resupply,” you finally say, because why beat around the fucking bush about this. “And higher quantities of ammo in general, as things are -“ You air-quote again, with both hands. This time, for a change, it’s not meant to mock. “‘-only getting worse’. Their words, not mine. What the hell they meant by that, no idea, but it can’t be fucking good. According to what I heard? The next time we dock, who knows at which station, it sounds like we’ll be stocking up to avoid docking anywhere for a long fucking time.”

“Who’s ‘somebody’?” John asks you slowly, cautiously.  
  
“Some mid-blood grunts,” you reply. “I obviously don’t know them on a personal level. I don’t _mingle._ ” You say the word sourly. “I was in one of the Ruffiannihilator’s offices to collect expenses for the reports I needed to finish for the quarter. Zahhak, you know, big blue-blooded meatsack knucklehead? Idiot didn’t have his expenses in order by the deadline, _like always_ , so he left to collect a copy of a statement that he lost because he’s stupid from another officer. He told me to wait, so I waited. And I guess people don’t know how to keep their damn mouths shut when they think nobody’s around, so I caught the conversation from the hallway.”  
  
“Ohh, so you eavesdropped, huh?” John wagers, one corner of his mouth twitching upward.  
  
“Not _my_ fucking fault,” you respond irritably, wrinkled at the blatant assumption. “I was just doing what I was told like the good little shitpuppet servant that I am, and _those_ assholes were right outside and fucking stage-whispering, how the hell am I not going to overhear?” You tap the pointed tip of one of your ears. “Only favorable thing about being a disgrace to the hemospectrum. Only one-up I have over all the others. Sharper fucking senses.”  
  
You decide not to mention that you purposely pushed yourself a little closer to the doorway to catch more of the discussion. He doesn’t need to know that part.  
  
“I don’t know where _they_ heard about all this, those grunts, but I could tell just by how… _conspiratorial_ the conversation was that it’s not business as usual. Too ominous to be. It was obviously not meant to be overheard by anyone else, either. Hush hush.” You scoff lightly. “Too bad for them, they keep forgetting about the mutant cockroach crawling along the hallways and lurking around the corners.”

John frowns. He hasn’t had your information to back his lingering concerns up until now. “And Dave?”  
  
You shrug one shoulder. “Kind of the same, from what he told me. Just from the other end. He didn’t tell me exactly _who_ he overheard, just that it was during one of his usual maintenance check-ups in the upper decks. And if any of the other engineers have gotten wind of anything like we have, they haven’t said a damn word about it.”

He sighs. It’s barely audible. Your ears hear it, anyway. “You’re probably going to drive yourself nuts trying to think of how to fix the situation, and I get that bec-”

“I never said I thought I could fix it,” you interrupt him defensively.

“... _because_ ,” he keeps going, undeterred, too used to you and your semi-automatic mouth by now. “Even I’ve done it. Just how our brains work. If something’s wrong, something feels off, we’re uncomfortable, so we immediately want to figure out if there’s a way to turn it around. What can we do? Who can we talk to? What steps do we need to take to get things back on track? Crap like that. We just want instant gratification, even from situations that we have no control over, you know?”

You hate it when he says ‘we’ like that, like you’re the same person or something. You know you’re similar in a lot of weird ways, but what the fuck?

You also hate that he’s right, the perceptive bastard.

“Maybe…” He hesitates, for kind of a longer time than you’re expecting. He looks sheepish as he tries to arrange his thoughts. You’ve seen that look plenty of times; he’s readying himself to say something without offending you right off the deep end.

“Is there a possibility that you’re both maybe reading a little too far into it?” You feel yourself tense and it must visibly show, because he’s quick to keep going. “I mean, not that you’re being unreasonable or anything, but I’m trying to be… Idunno, logical about it?”  
  
“You better not be insinuating that I don’t use logic,” you growl.  
  
He shakes his head so fast it’s like he’s trying to dislodge it from his neck. “No, no, that’s not what I’m saying. Yeah, sure, maybe something weird is happening and it’s only just now starting to come out into the open, but we’ve done major resupplies before a longer time off-planet in the past, you know? We’ve bulked up our artillery as a precautionary measure when we’ve done so, too, because who knows what we’d come across and the highbloods are always really careful. And ‘getting worse’? Shit.” He flicks one hand in a suspiciously dismissive gesture. “That could literally be about anything. This month’s meteor shower forecasting. The overcrowding problems on Ecstasis. Things like that. Things we’re used to, just used to on a much smaller scale.”  
  
You feel a small sting of betrayal, and you’re really uncomfortable with it.  
  
“You don’t believe us,” you say flatly.  
  
“It’s not that I don’t _believe_ you.” He seems to be getting kind of exasperated, but not necessarily completely at you - maybe at the fact that he knows he went a little too fucking far considering the circumstances and is now trying to figure out how he can backpedal out of it. Too bad for him, you hold onto your grudges with iron fists, doesn’t matter how big or small they are. “I believe that you guys have been getting wind of some possibly dubious shit and that it’s not being handled the best way, by them. If I heard what you did, verbatim, my mind would probably be running away with it, too.”  
  
You swing your legs over the edge of the bed and stand up, crossing your arms over your chest. It feels better to look down at _him_ for a fucking change, especially right now. “So you don’t believe us _and_ you think we’re being paranoid. Nice, Egbert.”  
  
“Man…” He stops and sighs again, loudly this time. “Stop.”  
  
“No,” you bite back. “No, _you told me_ a few days ago that you thought shit felt weird lately, too, and now that I’m going into specifics, all of a sudden I’m some conspiracy-theory nutjob who needs to be _soothed down_ with logic? Fuck you.”  
  
“Karkat, Jesus, I _literally_ just said that I believe you!” You’re both starting to raise your voices and he catches it, tries to calm his own down again. “I’m just having a hard time believing that it’s what you think it is. I can’t see something really serious being kept such a strange, sneaky secret from the rest of the ship. The entire fleet would be at stake and everyone would have to play a role in pulling ahead of it. Even you. Even me and Dave.”  
  
He looks at the floor and his mouth twists in thought.  
  
“But… say you and Dave are right on target,” he offers, just as you’re about to start arguing with him again. “Say something bigger _is_ going on, and it’s so bad that it’s only being reserved for the knowledge of the higher officers for now. What _could_ we do? Rise up? Revolt? Or just let the situation play out, no matter how anxious it makes us? Asking them politely for more info or clarification isn’t going to work. As it stands, we’re not in any special position to speak out of turn, anyway, especially about anything that might cause some kind of panic if it _did_ get out. So… if that’s the situation, and that’s the case…”  
  
He pauses, and then his tone changes. Softens, like he’s trying to break bad news to a dead soldier’s family. 

“There’s nothing we can do either way, man. We’re kind of powerless.”

You already know this.

You’ve known this the whole time. You’re a lot of despicable things, but _clueless_ isn’t one of them.

Your arms drop uselessly to your sides and the muscles in your face twitch into the ghost of a wince, because hearing that said out loud carries a way heavier weight than just rolling it uselessly around in your head does.

You’re defeated and frustrated and embarrassed to shit that he can manage to connect to you so easily and clearly, even when you’re not on the same page.  
  
You share a heartbeat of silent eye contact. It’s fucking awful.

“So what the hell do we even do, then?” you ask.

He just looks at you sympathetically.

  
******

That encounter did absolutely fuck-all for your nerves.  
  
Instead of wrapping up your conversation with a neatly closed door, you kept the subject open. You’re not letting this shit go that easily, but you felt immediately that you needed to do something else before you continued running around in fucking circles with John until he actually _really_ believed any of the words coming out of your damn maw. You are beyond frustrated that he’s only _hypothetically_ willing to entertain your thoughts on the situation, so instead of extending the argument (he’s your roommate - you know when to smother your pride and back out of something that could very well become a Situation when it comes to him because everyone knows that prolonging a fight with someone you live with is a horrible idea), you grabbed the gauze and roll of medical tape that you keep in the bottom drawer of your closet and excused yourself. He didn’t try to stop you because he’s gotten good at giving you your space, especially when it’s very, very clear that you need it.  
  
You half-fumed your ass directly to the gym and immediately went for the equipment locker, swiping a pair of Escrima sticks from the back like you usually do. You prefer solitary sparring over sparring with a partner because it allows you to work on what _you_ want. When you’re doing it just to effectively blow off steam, you are absolutely certain that having someone else fighting back will do nothing but further enrage you, and there’s a time and place for that kind of shit. This isn’t it.  
  
You aren’t sure what aggravates you more, you think as you methodically and gloomily wind the gauze around your knuckles - the fact that John just beat you half to death with his skepticism and made you feel stupid, or the fact that the only dickwad in the entire galaxy who’s even close to being on your side is Dave fucking Strider.  
  
After taking a few minutes to stretch out your limbs, you position yourself in front of the punching bag toward the back of the room that nobody else seems to want to use. Maybe because it’s the one of the three in the gym that you always claim and if they get near it, they might catch some incurable, terminal mutant disease. Good, screw them. Now you have your own punching bag all to yourself.

You huff out a quick breath, properly adjust your stance, and tighten each hand around the Escrimas.

_I’m not fucking paranoid._

  
Something hot flares in your chest. It’s exactly what you were waiting for, the signal for your body to react and initiate its physical defenses. You flick your wrist and one of the sticks rolls across your knuckles before settling back into your grasp and slapping loudly against your target with a strong blow. The sound is _beyond_ satisfying.

_Fuck you, John._

You’re already honed in and focused. Two, three, four more hits, with both sticks this time, a series of careful, well-practiced and calculated quick thrusts and cracks against the resilient, weighted bag, meant to retain control of the ‘fight’ and leave no openings for retaliation. The sounds are becoming a drum beat, off-tempo but strong and solid. Purposeful.

_Fuck you, Dave._

There’s a rhythm starting - this is the part that satisfies you the most - between the thick thumping strikes against the bag with the Escrimas and, with one of them held momentarily underneath your upper arm against your side, swift, quick punches.

_Fuck yourself, mutant shit._

There’s a peculiar pressure starting to stir up inside of you. This is what you want. Your instincts are fully in control now, and the next ten minutes are a flurried and mechanical blur of metrical slaps and thumps that reverberate pleasurably up along your arms. Your body is moving fluidly along with the hits, bending and turning with the potent, always present anger churning around in your gut like a geomagnetic storm. 

These little violent tantrums that you regularly participate in aren’t just to keep your reflexes and battle-ready instincts in check - they’re also kind of a fucked up fantasy, private and fictitious, something you can shamefully and desperately act out without anyone else having to know about it.

You imagine that the Escrima sticks in your hands are sickles.

You _always_ imagine that they’re sickles. Every single goddamn time. Because you wish, beyond everything and anything, that they were.

That’s something you will probably never fucking let go of. You know rationally that a mutant couldn’t ever be a Threshecutioner. Of course you know that; you bitterly remind yourself regularly. _Everyone_ knows it. It’s an unwritten Rule.

Still. 

Something in you _hopes._ Overlords, you really hate hope. It's never gotten anyone anywhere, as far as you know. It just feels fucking blind and childish. 

But...

As stupid and hypocritical you know it is, regardless, you hug that hope so tightly to your chest that it feels natural now, as natural as blinking.

Those ten minutes are incredibly successful in calming your irritation down. It’s only when you take a minute to rest - relaxing back into a normal stance, sweat prickling along your arms and the back of your neck and running in small rivulets down from your left temple to your jaw - that you hear the sharp, jarring sound of slow clapping from the doorway of the gym.

You spin toward the sound, still on high alert, and almost drop the sticks when you see who’s ‘applauding’ you.

He’s so tall and gangly in comparison to you - you know about him, obviously, but you’ve never seen him in person, _holy shit_ \- and his voice is grainy and rumbling and surprisingly sincere. 

“ _Daaamn_ ,” he drawls, lowering his raised eyebrows. The smile he’s aiming at you is calm, lazy, and unnervingly pleasant. “You got some _skills,_ my man.”

You properly straighten up and tuck one of the sticks under your armpit, crossing the free arm across your chest and bowing your head. You don’t really have horns to respectfully present to him because, you know, you _fucking_ _suck_ , but you present the stupid nubs anyway. You’re not exactly aching to endure punishment for a lack of respect right now.

“Makara,” you exhale acknowledgingly to the High Subjugglator through tired, heavy breaths.

He chuckles. It’s a low, menacing noise, like it’s coming from the back of a predator’s throat, and you just keep your head bowed. You hear his footsteps approaching and it scares you a little bit - you’re used to being knocked down a peg, so to fucking speak, when you haven’t done something right in the presence of someone above your station.  
  
“At ease,” he all but purrs as he stops directly in front of you. He almost sounds amused.  
  
You relax the salute and look up (like, _really_ up) at him. To say that he’s intimidating is one hell of a massive understatement, and it’s not just because of his height. His face is… _painted,_ streaked and messy and asymmetrical, like war paint that was applied in a hurry. His eyes are half-lidded but sharp and focused. His horns are impressively long and his hair reminds you of a lion’s mane. He smiles wider, shows his teeth, and it’s a wonder that you don’t piss your fucking pants like a pathetic little grub right there on the spot.  
  
You’re not sure what you’re supposed to say, so you remain quiet and give him the opening to speak first.  
  
And he does. “Sorry to barge into your piece, but man, you’re a _fast_ little motherfucker.” He gestures to the stick that’s still being held under your armpit with an index finger. His claws are long and filed to purposefully wicked points. “Where’d you learn to jam down with those things like that?”  
  
You suddenly feel awkward and self-conscious; you’re not used to being approached so casually, and you’re _definitely_ not used to being approached so casually by a high-ranked, highblooded officer.  
  
“Nowhere?” you reply sheepishly. It reflects with painful clarity in your voice. You hate yourself. “I just… practice here. A lot.” This is another understatement. You dedicate yourself to this shit at _least_ once a day. Sometimes you even come back in the evenings for another round.  
  
He hums and gives you a once-over that makes your skin crawl a little, but despite that, you are also somehow curiously on the cusp of excitement because of it.  
  
“What’s your station, brother?” he asks.  
  
“Uh…” You hate this question with the seething fires of hell. “I’m the ship’s ectobiologist.”  
  
His eyebrows raise again and for a moment, he actually looks surprised. “No shit? Nothin’ else?”  
  
You want to fidget so badly. “I have basic cadet training,” you clarify. “But I’ve never used it first-hand.”  
  
He squints at you a little, his head tilting slightly to the side.  
  
“You’re the red-blood everyone gabs about, huh?”  
  
You feel your face heat up and you drop your gaze from his face to somewhere along his chest. Here we fucking go again. “...yes, sir.”  
  
The last time a higher officer asked you something like this, you were shoved and spat on. The only thing you can really do is brace yourself for something similar and just hope it’s over with quickly with minimal damage.  
  
But it doesn’t happen.  
  
Instead, there’s a small pause before he tsks and crosses his arms. “Ectobiologist,” he says with a hard pinch of sarcasm. “What a motherfuckin’ shame. Moves like yours bein’ wasted.”  
  
Your eyes dart back up to meet his. You’re confused. Is he joking? Fucking around with you?  
  
His gaze on you is so _serious,_ though. There’s something really off-putting about how legitimately genuine he seems, how he’s able to radiate sincerity so well that it’s practically palpable. There is _something_ about him that you can’t place. Lurking just under that dirty mouth and chilling nonchalance is some kind of wisdom and intellectual acuity that he isn’t bringing to the surface, for whatever reason. He’s undeniably fascinating.

”Wasted?” you dig for more, carefully measuring your tone around the question to avoid sounding pushy.  
  
“Like a bullet in the sky,” he responds easily. “You like bein’ in a lab?”  
  
Your guard is still way up, so you don’t answer right away. _No,_ you honestly want to say. _No, absolutely no, I’d trade places with anyone, I fucking hate it._ You don’t want to push your luck, though, so you shrug a little instead and mumble, “It’s what’s expected of me.”  
  
That wasn’t exactly an answer, but he catches the meaning underneath it so easily that it’s like he’s reading your mind.  
  
“Mm, I fuckin’ hear you,” he replies thoughtfully and scans you head-to-feet with those maddeningly ancient eyes of his again. Your face gets even hotter, who fucking knows why. Probably you’re just embarrassed. “Loud and clear.”  
  
He reaches down and plucks the Escrima out from under your arm. He lets it roll with expert fluidity over the back of his hand a few times. He’s hardly even looking at it. He doesn’t have to - he _is_ a Subjugglator, after all.  
  
“Tell you what, my man,” he says as the stick comes to rest again in his full grasp. He leans in a little and taps you gently on the chest with the end of it. “Meet me here tomorrow and have a motherfuckin’ scuffle with me. Wanna see how you can flow with another brother, not just a bag.” He shows you his teeth in a wide grin again. “Cool?”  
  
He leaves the tip of the stick against your chest until you bring your hand up to grab it. He lets go and backs up, watching you expectantly. He wants you to answer him. He’s leaving it up to you.  
  
“Uh… yeah,” you respond slowly. This suddenly feels incredibly surreal and you are warily waiting for the other shoe to drop and give you a fucking concussion. “Sure. I can do that.” 

“Fuck yeah,” he rumbles, openly pleased. “Let’s go with the same time, then.”  
  
You nod stupidly.  
  
He turns and strides with an easy, swaggering air back toward the door, but he hesitates when he gets there. Cranes his neck a little to look at you again. “What do I call you, friend?”  
  
You swallow. “Vantas. Karkat, first name.”  
  
You sound like a goddamn moron. If he agrees with that sentiment, though, he’s not showing it.  
  
Instead, he nods back, mulling it over.  
  
“Tomorrow then,” he confirms and gives you lazy finger guns. You thought only Dave did that. “Lookin’ forward to it, KK.”  
  
After he’s gone, you’re left standing in the same spot to digest everything that just happened, your brain a jumbled mess of questions and suspicions and curiosities, the entirety of your face still red and burning, and your hand still clutching the Escrima against your sternum like you’re afraid to let it go.

  
  
  



End file.
